


y0u_burn_m3_.pdf

by flybbfly



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hackers, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-02
Updated: 2016-06-02
Packaged: 2018-07-11 21:36:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 28,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7071361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flybbfly/pseuds/flybbfly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Les Amis de l'ABC are a group of wannabe revolutionaries using cybercrime to their advantage. Enjolras is a security engineer by day, vigilante hacker by night. Grantaire is an artist, Enjolras is pretty sure—but he's an artist who catches on to what the ABC are doing surprisingly quickly. One part Mr. Robot AU, one part spy thriller, one part Romeo and Juliet, a splash of Fight Club, a lot of making out. Probably-inaccurate hacker AU.</p><p>“This all starts with a cup of coffee at some place that isn't Starbucks, and then Grantaire has a gun pushed between Enjolras's teeth and he's saying, “Talk now. Talk or I swear to god I'll shoot.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. part_i_rec0nn0itr3.docx

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: mental illness and its appropriate treatment; descriptions of paranoia and anxiety; drug use, prescription and otherwise; ableist slurs (crazy/insane etc); moments that could be read as gaslighting if gaslighting could occur inadvertently; a blink-and-you'll-miss-it mention of self injury; likely incorrect or at least implausible descriptions of computer engineering (I did a crash course on programming & read up on hacking beforehand, but then I kind of … extrapolated?); brief moments of violence including a gun.
> 
> Quick disclaimer: I probably know less about computer engineering than you do. If there are glaring errors that fuck with your suspension of disbelief, then let's say that this is actually a work of magical realism and Combeferre, Feuilly, and Enjolras are legit wizards.
> 
> Also, [here is a map of NYC](https://i.imgur.com/4yVwU2Z.png) labelled with the relevant neighborhoods and places. You might want to take a look at that before/during reading (yes, I edited a subway map).

How dared you give my soul a skin, a face, a voice  
              and let it set your tongue ablaze  
              and let it scald your belly  
              and let it burn your nights  
                            and let it taint me.  
Pauline Albanese, “The Lost Arrows”

* * *

  


This all starts with a cup of coffee at some place that isn't Starbucks, and then Grantaire has a gun pushed between Enjolras's teeth and he's saying, “Talk now. Talk or I swear to god I'll shoot.”

“Alf ggrt frt wuf gah im ma ma,” Enjolras says.

“What?” Grantaire says, taking the gun out of Enjolras's mouth and pressing it between his eyebrows instead. It's damp and cold, and Enjolras can't help but think that's his own spit there, and that's really sort of gross.

“I said I can't talk with the gun in my mouth.”

“You're such a fucking asshole,” Grantaire says, his hand dropping but the gun still cocked in his grip. “Now _talk_.”

*

When they meet, it's after an extended argument during which Combeferre insists that Starbucks isn't BDS-friendly and anyway this place has amazing reviews on Yelp and a supposedly unbeatable cold brew.

“But do they have frappuccinos?” Courfeyrac asks, squinting up at the sign, cigarette in his mouth all but gone out. “Cause you know baby Enjolras won't fuck with them if they don't.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Enjolras says. “I'm equally good with a vanilla latte so long as they have caramel drizzle.”

It's only a half-joke: inside LiberTea (he has to admit its name played a part in his agreeing to come), Enjolras orders the drink from a friendly, freckled Asian barista whom Courfeyrac knows by name. For all its amazing reviews, the place is deserted, only the three of them, the barista, another employee, and a guy with circles under his eyes and paint on his hands occupying the admittedly not huge space. It's not like there's a dearth of coffeeshops in Williamsburg, though, and it's the middle of the day on a Tuesday, and Enjolras figures everyone else is elsewhere.

He carries their coffee order to the table Combeferre has already set up camp at, remote enough so they won't be heard by the one other customer but close enough to the door that they can make a speedy exit if need be.

“Okay,” Combeferre says. He's already connected to the coffeeshop's wifi and opened Tor. It's moving pretty fast for Tor, which Enjolras attributes to the fact that they're the only ones using the wifi other than the painter, whose Macbook is so dated that it's a dingy white. “So. I got access to all their servers, which means access to everyone who uses their site, which means—”

“Half the politicians in the _world_ ,” Courfeyrac says, watching Combeferre scroll through a .txt of his Terminal results. “Impressive.”

“Premier escort services in Manhattan,” Enjolras says. “I can't believe they all used the same one. Not sure if they're more stupid or disgusting.”

“Both,” Combeferre says. “I've been up all night decrypting this.” He looks it, too, lines around his mouth and hands shaking. Enjolras is better at decrypting, but he was tied up at his actual job, so Combeferre took charge on this project. “Look at some of these messages.”

The guy across the cafe shifts. It's so minor that Enjolras almost thinks it's just a normal fidget, but when he looks up he swears the guy looks away immediately. 

“I think that dude is watching us,” Enjolras half-whispers.

Courfeyrac looks across the cafe at him in evaluation. “Doubtful. He's always here. Think he's friends with the owner.”

“He's an artist,” Combeferre says, pulling up the guy's facebook page. “I saw his cup,” he tells an incredulous Courfeyrac, and then, moments later, pries into the cafe's unsecured network to look at what the sites the guy's visiting. “Pretty normal stuff. Google Docs, PayPal, bitcoin, Spotify. Probably just selling art or something.”

“I swear he was just looking at us.”

“Maybe he was just looking at us for a normal reason,” Courfeyrac says. “Look, he has earbuds in. He's not paying attention to us at all.”

“We just look shady all sitting here staring at one laptop,” Combeferre says. 

Courfeyrac frowns around Combeferre at Enjolras. “Are you—you know. You taking your meds?”

Enjolras runs a hand through his hair in irritation. “ _Yes_.”

“Don't lie to me.”

“I'm not lying,” Enjolras says. Low-dose Thorazine at night, Zoloft in the mornings, Xanax in his bag just in case, twenty milligram Ritalin when he can't get it together at work, Ambien if the Thorazine isn't enough. It's a lot, but at least he doesn't have Combeferre's anti-titration of Suboxone, Courfeyrac's daily Adderall and lithium, the super high dosage of Ativan Jehan takes any time he has to communicate with new people. 

But he's gone off his meds before, so Courfeyrac's right to worry even if he's wrong about what he's worrying about. And he gets that feeling again, which makes him wonder if maybe he should ask his psych for a higher dosage or just talk to his therapist about this, but when Enjolras glances up again, it's quickly enough that the artist—Grantaire, his facebook page said—doesn't have time to look away.

Instead, Grantaire catches his eye and half-smiles and then, so ridiculously that it feels like it might well be out of one of the rom-coms Jehan sometimes insists they watch after meetings to unwind, winks.

Enjolras, who is very smart, tested at near-genius levels in his youth when his parents dumped him in psychiatrist's office after psychiatrist's office, graduated near the top of his class at Stuy _and_ Columbia Engineering, has degrees in comp-e and poli sci and spends more than half his days staring at screens solving problems, has been called brilliant since he wrote code that could unlock enough security systems at once to disable a major bank when he was in tenth grade, doesn't have a clue how to deal with this. Enjolras, who is very smart, is actually kind of an idiot, and so—without considering the consequences, really—Enjolras rolls his eyes back.

Grantaire grins, and then stands up, and then comes over to their table.

That's when it all goes to shit.

*

Grantaire the painter is a bona fide artist. Tisch grad, he tells them, has an MFA equivalent from some school in Paris and used to do comics for the New Yorker. Constant cigarette in his mouth, lips cracked at the corners but inviting anyway, laugh lines at the corner of his eyes, a sharpness Enjolras isn't accustomed to from people who aren't genius-level engineers or doctors or lawyers.

“That's your problem, isn't it,” Grantaire says, two hours after they first meet. “Your bare-minimum for thinking people are smart is that they're engineers. And then after they're engineers, they have to be writing-security-for-banks level brilliant.”

“And then after they're write-security-for-banks level brilliant, they have to be find-and-fix-the-exploits level clever,” Courfeyrac chimes in, which doesn't help Enjolras's cause at all.

Later, they look him up, Courfeyrac cracking into Grantaire's facebook account so quickly it's a joke considering he doesn't actually have any engineering knowledge at all—“His password is literally pollock69,” Courfeyrac says, laughing, scrolling through Grantaire's messages—and then switching over to LinkedIn. Everything Grantaire's said holds true, from his PayPal account transactions (with half-descriptive names, “5x10 portrait tall man,” “big landscape—french countryside,” “saudi family ren-style painting”) to his alma mater. He teaches a dance class, too, Thursday afternoons at the Bed-Stuy Y. 

The ethics of it haven't stopped making Enjolras's stomach churn, but he forces himself to think the way he's been forcing himself to think for years: if they trust this guy surface-level and he turns out to be more than he says or less than he pretends, they'll fuck everyone over.

But a quick check and gut feeling (“Gut is almost always right,” Courfeyrac likes to say, though—Enjolras will remember later—he never says it about Grantaire) tell them they're in the clear.

So the number Grantaire gave them, Brooklyn area code, registered to an AT&T iPhone (“An artist's phone,” Combeferre says, only half-joking), the number gets a text.

_hey it was great meeting you today. we run this social justice organization & there's a meeting tomorrow night at the musain in the lower east side. you should come through. - e_

*

“A barista, a hacker, and an artist walk into a bar,” Grantaire says, which should've been one of the first warning signs. He turns his gaze on Enjolras: light brown eyes, so blank Enjolras thinks he might drown if he looks at them too long. “Stop me if you've heard this one before.”

Enjolras smiles despite himself.

“You're here,” he says. “You'll help us.”

“Depends on what I'm helping you with,” Grantaire says. He casts a surreptitious glance toward the bar where Eponine is showing the new bartender the ropes, and, under the cover of his tall barista friend, lights a cigarette.

“The revolution, of course,” says Enjolras, almost by accident, giddy off this wonderful new person. They have poets and lawyers and doctors and hackers, but no artists, especially none whose art looks like Grantaire's, strung across galleries in the Village. Someone with reach, someone with a voice, someone who might help them.

And then Grantaire laughs. “Very funny,” he says. “What are you? Like, some kind of anarcho-socialist wannabes? Let me guess: doxxing the rich and sending bitcoins to the poor.”

How does he know? They told him they were engineers, but not that they were hackers. 

“Nothing like that,” Enjolras says. “I mean, not really—but your guess about our political leanings is close, I suppose.” He straightens, annoyed at himself. “Listen, stay for the meeting, let me know what you think.” He tries a smile. “I'll see you soon.”

Grantaire raises both eyebrows and then smiles back. His canines are sharp. That should've been a warning sign, too.

“You're going to speak?” he says. 

“Yeah. Uh—Combeferre, Courfeyrac, and I usually lead the meetings.”

“A leader.” Those teeth again. “Well. I won't keep the whole club waiting.” The way he says it—club—is just patronizing enough to nestle into Enjolras's skin. “Break a leg, Apollo.”

*

“What do you guys think of him?”

It's a few weeks later and it's late in the Musain, only the new bartender there, wiping down the bar and periodically glancing down at her phone. People looking down at their phones is one of Enjolras's least favorite things: it sets his teeth on edge, makes him wonder despite years of therapy if they're talking about him. He's heavily medicated enough that he knows it's illogical now, but the paranoia is still there, just under the surface of his skin.

“He seems nice.” Combeferre is typing up all the notes from the meeting, encrypting them, and posting them on Les Amis' private forum on the dark web. It's behind two passwords and at least one code, but they change their .onion URL weekly anyway. “Smart, funny. Doesn't seem to really give a shit about the cause, though.”

“He does. I know he does. Deep down.”

“You sure you aren't projecting?” That glance over his glasses. Raised eyebrow. “Just because you like him, doesn't mean he has to be—”

“I've never liked anyone who isn't. My instincts with this are always right. The people I'm drawn to tend to want change just as much as I do.”

“But do they tend to believe in it as fiercely as you?”

No. But then, most people who aren't already Amis don't.

“He's been to three meetings already,” Enjolras says. He thinks of Grantaire's blank brown eyes, and then he thinks of the laugh lines at their corners. “There's—that's not something you do if you don't give a shit.”

“What I'm still stuck on—” Courfeyrac, frowning, eraser end of a pencil near his lips and Grantaire's hacked Facebook account open on his laptop “—is that he guessed you were a hacker. Doesn't that worry you?”

“No,” Enjolras says. “I think it's a fair assessment of what an infosec engineer does. It was clever of him, figuring that out and then making a joke about it.”

“Well,” Courfeyrac says, closing the laptop. “If _you_ aren't suspicious …” He smiles. “He walked into your life like a wet dream in a leather jacket. It's not _that_ surprising, I guess.”

“It's not like that. I just think it's good to have someone like him on our side.”

“Right,” Courfeyrac says.

“The other day, he asked me if I was okay with physical affection.”

“And you said …?” Combeferre asks.

“Well, it was good of him to ask. A lot of people don't. They just assume everyone's fine with getting felt up by people they barely know.”

“So you said no?” 

“Of course I didn't say no.”

“Of course you didn't,” Courfeyrac says, looking up at Combeferre.

They both give Enjolras irritatingly knowing smiles. He rolls his eyes and forces himself not to grin helplessly in return.

*

A good hacker, Enjolras will think later, is good at both hacking and making it look like nothing's been hacked at all. It's kind of like murder: anyone can shoot someone. It takes a special type of human being to clean it up so perfectly, lie about it so smoothly, fudge the details in just the right way that it seems like they were nowhere near the scene of the crime at all.

Backdating transactions on a PayPal server isn't exactly impossible work. It's a simple matter of figuring out their particular type of fee-harvesting and fraud detection software and then fucking with the dates. If you can get into PayPal's network in the first place, the rest is a joke. 

Of course, you have to be pretty good with computers to get into PayPal's network at all. You have to be better to hide it.

It's the same for LinkedIn, but a little easier because they barely have any security against backdating. It's not fraud to say you updated your profile several years before you actually did. Facebook, too, though they have actual monetary transactions and have access to so much information globally that their security is top of the line. But with a little backdating on your actual computer, a little playing with your timeline, deleting just the right posts, putting in just the right privacy settings, you can almost do it with no illicit work at all.

The thing about hackers is that most of them are just engineers, STEM jackasses, loners who prefer the glow of a computer screen to human interaction. But the good ones, the really good ones, are extroverts. They're good at hacking because to hack is to exploit, and machines can't be exploited. People, though. People can be exploited.

If you're a good hacker, and not just a good hacker but a clever person, the kind of person who knows how people work and what people look for when they look for inconsistencies, then you can fuck with it just enough so that it looks legit to any scans that are only a couple of levels deep, and certainly to something as surface-level as a password crack by a lawyer with techie friends and a look at your Facebook messages.

Grantaire—Enjolras figures out much, much later—is a very, very good hacker.

*

“I know this clashes with our politics,” Courfeyrac says one day, when he, Combeferre, and Enjolras are gathered at Enjolras's apartment, working, “but I think maybe we should get guns?”

“Why?” Combeferre asks.

“I don't know, we just—this is pretty sensitive stuff. You never know who else is watching it.”

“You don't seriously think we'd be able to take on the U.S. government with a couple of guns,” Enjolras says.

“Not the U.S. government,” Courfeyrac says. “Other—people like us. People who'd leverage information for money, not change. I don't know. You never know. Have you spent any time on message boards on the Onion network? It's not exactly— _wholesome_.”

Enjolras looks at Combeferre, who is considering this thoughtfully.

“Not the worst plan,” Combeferre says.

“Really?” Enjolras says. “You guys want to get guns … in New York City?”

“We probably can't get licenses for concealed carry or anything, but at least we'd be safe in our own apartments,” Courfeyrac says.

“Gun statistics say—”

“I know what they say. But it's not like gun statistics are dealing with the kinds of people we're dealing with. They're dealing with home invasions, drug dealers, little kids accidentally shooting their parents. We all live alone or with reasonably competent adults, and I'm pretty sure we'll be okay.”

“If you think it's necessary,” Enjolras says, shrugging. “Just don't let Marius near one.”

*

The next time Grantaire comes to a meeting, he disassembles Enjolras's argument piece by piece. The baristas from the cafe at which Combeferre, Courfeyrac, and Enjolras have become regulars—Bossuet and Joly—roll their eyes at Grantaire, whisper things to him under their breath that Enjolras assumes are meant to get Grantaire to shut up. But in the few weeks Enjolras has known him, he's already figured out that Grantaire does not shut up no matter who tells him to.

So instead, Grantaire argues with Enjolras so effectively that by the end of it, people who aren't Grantaire actually nod along in slight agreement. 

“That'll never work,” he says constantly, or, “You're going to hack Sony? Really? Isn't that a little passé?” or, “You don't think that if this is effective, they'll just pump up their security more? Make it harder to crack next time?”

Sometimes, Enjolras has to admit, Grantaire has a point, and it helps (or doesn't help) that he always does that thing with his lip: just before his final blow at Enjolras's argument, he always bites down on the right corner, such a brief motion it might be a tic. Enjolras lifts a hand to brush his own lower lip unconsciously, realizes he's done it, and forces himself to focus on the argument again. And then it happens the next time, and then the next, and then it's pavlovian, a response Enjolras never notices but just can't shake.

The meetings Enjolras hates the most are the ones when Grantaire doesn't talk at all, only leans back in his corner (always balancing precariously on the back two legs of his seat, lip pressed momentarily between teeth) and sketches or twirls his pen or just stares absent-mindedly at the ceiling.

“Grantaire? Anything to add?” Enjolras asked the first time.

“What? About this?” An insouciant little snort. Empty eyes trained on Enjolras's. “No.”

“Why not?”

“It seems pointless, and pointless things don't interest me.”

Enjolras stared at him, unable to hide his disappointment, and in the future, he takes it as a good sign when Grantaire argues.

*

His therapist asks Enjolras if he's taking his meds, too, but that's her job, so he doesn't resent her quite as much.

“Every day,” he says dully. 

They're working, too: other than the spike of anxiety when he caught—or didn't catch—Grantaire looking the day they met, Enjolras's paranoia is almost completely gone. He feels naked without it, like when he doesn't have his phone within reach, but he has to admit it's nice being able to sit on the subway without being sure half the people on it are watching him.

“How are your friends?”

“I made a new one, actually,” Enjolras says. “Uh—his name is Grantaire. I hacked him, obviously, or, well, Combeferre did.” Combeferre did and then Enjolras did, a rudimentary snoop, surface-level at best. Grantaire has two factor authentication on his gmail but it's a joke figuring out his iCloud password because all his passwords are some variation on pollock69, sometimes with an exclamation point or a zero instead of one of the O's. Mostly it's all stuff from society6 or the owner of a gallery showing his work. Subscription emails from some men's clothing stores. Coupons and amazon. Everything you'd expect to find in twenty-something guy's email. “He's clean and normal and he's really smart, but he disagrees with me a lot. Courfeyrac says that's a good thing, which I guess it is—sometimes I think I get stuck in a feedback loop, you know? A reddit circlejerk, except it's my whole life. We hear the same phrases over and over. Police brutality, wage gap, transmisogyny, the industrial prison complex. You know? And those are important things, vitally important, like—risk your life important, right? But—it's good to have someone around to break that up a little.”

“What does he do?”

“He's an artist.”

She smiles. “Finally,” she says. “Some friends who don't spend all day online.”

*

“Dude, I think Grantaire has a thing for you,” Courfeyrac says one day before an ABC meeting, paperwork spread out on the table in front of him. They've been using hard copies more and more lately, handwritten, sometimes run through a couple of simple codes. Courfeyrac is good at codes. They're lucky he's a lawyer, but sometimes Enjolras wonders if he wouldn't have better served himself if he'd further pursued engineering, not just the undergrad CS degree but grad school, information security, government agencies.

“Why's that?”

“He's always watching you.”

“I noticed that too,” Enjolras says, looking over Courfeyrac's shoulder at Combeferre's spiky but neat handwriting. “But it's—” He pauses, unable to think of what exactly it is. “Irrelevant. What is all this?”

“A list of corporations Combeferre wants to get started on. He thinks a couple of them invest more in certain governments than they say, and as a result they're fucking with those governments' foreign policy. Look at this—supposedly Iran can't access some of this agency's websites, but there's no documented reason for them not to.” He indicates his laptop. “Look—when I look at it from an Iranian proxy—nothing. But from a French one …” He clicks around, shows Enjolras the results. “It's weird, and Combeferre thinks it's worth looking into.”

“What's up?”

Grantaire has sidled up behind them, putting his chin on Enjolras's shoulder to peer at the table. He's short enough that he has to stand on his tiptoes to do it, which puts most of his weight on Enjolras. It's a blatant invasion of personal space by an almost-stranger, and normally it would set Enjolras's teeth on edge. There's an uneasiness anyway, but this is something he's talked about with his therapist, that whole “letting people in” thing, and maybe it doesn't apply here but somehow Enjolras doesn't entirely mind.

“Nothing,” Enjolras says. Grantaire's body is very warm behind him, distractingly present. “Did you take the battery out of your phone?”

“Can't,” Grantaire says. “I have an iPhone. Threw it in the lockbox Feuilly was passing around, though.”

“That's good.” Enjolras turns so he's facing Grantaire, who notices a little late that he's too close and takes a step back. Enjolras can still feel his presence, though, all that warmth. He tries to shift so that he's blocking all the papers with his body. “Joly and Bossuet are here too?”

“Yeah, we're sitting over there.”

“Great. Try not to pick too many fights tonight, yeah?”

Grantaire backs off a little, smiling, reaching into his pockets to pull out a cigarette and glancing around—as always—for the bartender. But Musichetta isn't paying attention, and he lights it cheerily. For all the laziness of his previous sprawl over Enjolras's body, Grantaire has gone tense now, smoking in catlike stillness, the only movement that of his lips as he exhales and his fingers as he draws his cigarette away from his face, then back again.

“Only if you try not to say anything too stupid,” Grantaire says. Enjolras kind of wants to knock the cigarette out from between his lips, and then he wonders if he envies the cigarette, and then he realizes he's spent too long staring at Grantaire's mouth.

“I'll do my best,” Enjolras manages, and Grantaire glances up at him. 

There's a moment where there's something else in Grantaire's eyes, not emptiness but—but he shutters his expression so quickly that Enjolras can't place _what_ it is. He opens his mouth to ask about it, but Grantaire reaches over to tug a lock of Enjolras's hair before leaving to go to his seat.

Looking up between them, Courfeyrac smiles. Then he gathers up the papers and throws them unceremoniously into the Musain's fire.

*

Enjolras is grateful, he supposes, that his parents paid for him to go to Columbia. He wouldn't have qualified for financial aid, and taking out the full two hundred and fifty thousand dollars would've sunk him before his career even started. But, he supposes, he always had that parental safety net, the ability to squeeze his thumb and cut off his gag reflex and go home and ask to be un-disowned.

It's not a bad microcosm of the American financial system, college. If you start out rich, you'll come out on top: best tutors, best private schools, best test prep. If not, you either get lucky and get into some school like Harvard or Vassar that gives good aid, or you end up choosing between a private school that costs too much and a state school that's much cheaper. The way you get there: hard work, balancing a dozen after school activities with schoolwork and test prep, sometimes adding in caring for your parents or a job, but sometimes it's not even worth it. Because even after all that, tuition to a private college still costs somewhere in the realm of sixty or seventy thousand dollars. For a low income family, that school might cost less than a state school that gives worse financial aid. But college ends up costing most people tens of thousands, and if they're unlucky, hundreds of thousands.

All that money dumped into all those board members' wallets, and people complain about textbooks.

That's why, sitting on this bench during an unseasonably warm winter day, trying to get a good read on the president of one of the biggest banks in New York, Enjolras is squeezing his thumb again. Courfeyrac once told him it would help him repress his gag reflex. It isn't working.

The bank president is having lunch at a restaurant that boasts a $110 five course lunch prix fixe, featuring such deservedly expensive dishes as “fresh sole,” a fish that—Enjolras has investigated despite not being able to cook himself—typically costs less than $7 a pound at Trader Joe's.

But it isn't, Enjolras thinks, about the bank president's lunch. It's about his job.

He stands up and walks back to work, where he slips some of the bank president's information onto a flash drive that he tucks into his pocket for later.

*

Grantaire, Enjolras has learned, is not like any of the rest of his friends. Unlike Les Amis, Grantaire rarely talks about his political beliefs. He rarely lets on that he believes anything at all, in fact. Instead, he talks around his actual political views until Enjolras has deconstructed his own argument to the point of incomprehension and then Grantaire, grinning, says, “See? Doesn't make sense,” like he's Socrates disproving Enjolras to make a point instead of just to irritate him, get under his skin.

It does make his arguments better, though, having to anticipate and then circumvent Grantaire's counterarguments, having to ensure his rationales are airtight. It forces him to consider every possible response to everything he says, and it seems to work, Grantaire watching him during meetings, chewing on his lower lip, and Enjolras sometimes unable to look away, magnetically drawn to him. It makes Enjolras feel on fire—if before he was capable now he's powerful, like Grantaire takes him from spark to full-fledged flame.

*

The Musain's food isn't the best in New York City by a long shot, which irritates resident foodies Feuilly and Grantaire to no end because Enjolras so often insists on meetings right at dinner time.

This week's meeting ends around the time dinner starts, and Enjolras slides into the seat next to Grantaire instead of across the booth from him for once.

“This is new,” Grantaire says, voice low enough to be almost intimate. 

Enjolras shrugs, but he can feel the warmth of Grantaire's leg under the table, their thighs pressed together. Grantaire seems to notice just as Enjolras does, and he moves away so infinitesimally that it might have been a tic—except that Grantaire's grip on his fork is so tight that his knuckles are white.

“What did you think of the meeting today?”

“You really want to know?”

“I always want to know.”

“You only want to know when I think whatever disaster you've pledged yourself to is salvageable.”

Enjolras waits, and Grantaire sighs, but Enjolras can see him smiling out of the corner of his eye.

“I think trying to take down high-powered executives is a waste of time.”

“Why?”

“Because they'll just be replaced by other high-powered executives who are better at cleaning their trails.” Grantaire examines his empty plate as if it's supposed to respond to him instead of Enjolras. “Cut off one head, three more grow in its place.”

“You're saying we'd be more effective if we went for the heart of banking.”

“You can't end banking,” Grantaire says. “It's the cornerstone of capitalism.”

“Adam Smith didn't think we'd be over here betting on whether companies would win or lose,” Enjolras says. “There's nothing about interest rates and risky mortgages in _Wealth of Nations_.”

“Investors are alienated from the product of their labor in a way,” Grantaire agrees. “But I don't mean classical capitalism. I mean twenty-first century American neoliberalism. If the market is free, banks will exist. Not to regulate it, but to gamble on it.” His grip on his fork relaxes and he spins it on his plate before turning to meet Enjolras's eyes at last. “People have been lending and loaning since the Old Testament. That's not going to stop just because banking doesn't exist.”

“You think banks are inevitable?”

“I think they're part of our cultural and societal DNA. Human self-interest—profiting on people who need a buck—that's not going to change.” He bites down on the lower right part of his lip, and Enjolras reaches up to brush his own lip automatically. “If you're going to kill the monster, you need to go deeper. Or you can attack it from the outside-in.”

“The outside-in?”

“If you can prove that banking execs did something illegal and get the case to the Supreme Court, you can actually change something.”

Their appetizers come, an array of dips and snacks that Grantaire completely ignores in favor of maintaining eye contact with Enjolras. 

“You think we should get the banks charged with something.”

“You have lawyers,” Grantaire says. “You have political theorists. You have security engineers. You're telling me you couldn't dig hard enough, and then sue?”

Enjolras stares at him. It seems so easy, all above-board except for maybe getting some information illicitly. 

“I'm not saying you have to operate within the boundaries of the law to change things,” Grantaire says. “But short of a real revolution, it's hard to convince people to side with you if you're in jail for blackmailing someone more powerful than you.”

Enjolras frowns at him: for a moment, he almost thinks Grantaire is talking about something else. But then Grantaire gives him that half-smile, and Enjolras thinks how much easier this relentless antagonizing is to take when it's just for him and not a show for the entire Musain. Like this—just the two of them—it almost feels like a conversation he might have had with Courfeyrac or Combeferre before, when they were still operating mostly above-board, when Enjolras was too unmedicated to do too many illegal things because the thought of police following him drove him half out of his mind. 

“Maybe,” Enjolras says. The low light of the Musain catches Grantaire's face just right, making his eyes look bright and warm, and for a split second Enjolras can think of nothing more than how much he wants to kiss him. The feeling swells inside him so strongly that Enjolras has to look away, and then Grantaire's fingers are at his wrist.

“You haven't eaten anything,” Grantaire says. “Tell me you find the Musain's food as boring as I do.”

“I find it—serviceable,” Enjolras says, and Grantaire laughs.

Enjolras looks at anything other than Grantaire, but he can feel that he's smiling too.

*

“What if we just—destroyed the banks?”

“Destroyed the banks,” Combeferre repeats.

“Yeah. Destroyed all their records.”

“How would people get their money?”

“Good point.” Enjolras twirls his pen in his hand. “What if we just destroyed all record of debt?”

“Like, completely took down Sallie Mae or whatever?”

“Yeah.”

“How would we do that?”

“We could start small,” Enjolras says. “With this one guy.” He hands Combeferre the flash drive, and Combeferre immediately sticks it into the USB port on his laptop.

“Hm,” is all he says.

“Look, I have all this information about who he's donated to, what he's donated to, and he's sleeping with escorts and prostitutes, mostly men—we could destroy this guy.”

“I don't know,” Combeferre says. “I mean, ideally we'd be able to get rid of exploitative banks, but that would mean a restructuring of the international economic system, and that's not something you can accomplish over the course of one lifetime. At least, not without getting caught.” 

But he looks at Enjolras, leaning ever so slightly forward, and Enjolras knows that if he presses the issue, Combeferre will agree.

“You don't even think we should expose this one guy?”

“I mean, what's the point? So he gets fired, _maybe_. Almost definitely doesn't get charged with anything, and likely gets replaced by someone just as bad but with better security on his phone. Let's go for what we know will be—” he pauses, choosing his words carefully. “Efficient.”

“The U.S. government,” Enjolras says.

Combeferre smiles. “I like the way you think.”

*

“How much privacy are you willing to give up for security?” Enjolras says, standing on a chair and waving his arms, his usual method of getting attention. Today's a call to action meeting, purely for the purpose of getting people to call their Congressmen and try to convince them to vote “yes” on a bill that would stop corporations from accessing private data. Enjolras's job is to make people actually listen. It doesn't take much, really. People have always paid attention to him. It used to bother him until he learned how to use it to his advantage. “What about for the sake of convenience? How many personal liberties would you give up to make your life easier? How many have you already?”

He holds up a phone—ancient iPhone, tinkered with by Feuilly until he could get the battery out and then glued back together. 

“When this has a battery in it, it acts as a honing device. Anyone with the right know-how can figure out exactly where you are at any time. Who you're talking to. What you're saying. Even what you're doing. Your privacy is a personal liberty, and it's been stripped away from you in exchange for an opaque phone with a shitty built-in browser.”

“Who even uses Apple Maps?” Bahorel says, which sends cheers around the room. 

“But Google's no better,” Enjolras says. “They have even more control over even more of your life—you ever typed something into their search bar and been shocked at how quickly they guessed what you wanted? Remember when the recommended terms used to just be the things that were most searched for?”

People cheer in affirmation again, raise their drinks in agreement. 

“We've traded our personal information, any semblance of privacy, for the convenience of iMessage and Chromecast,” Enjolras half-shouts, and then he catches sight of Grantaire, leaning back on the back two legs of his chair, one leg up on the table and a cigarette in his mouth. He raises his glass when he notices that Enjolras has caught sight of him, but otherwise, he looks barely-engaged, his mouth set in this irritating little half-smile as he doodles something on a sketchpad. Enjolras, more than a little annoyed, climbs up onto the table. “And we need—to get it—back!”

He slams the iPhone down on the table, watches as the screen shatters, looks back up at Grantaire to see if this gets his attention—and realizes that it hasn't.

Grantaire, in a room full of shouting cheering people, is sketching something and looking really like he wishes he had his phone.

*

“What were you drawing?”

“A building,” Grantaire says, showing Enjolras his pad.

“Didn't realize you were into architecture.”

“Didn't realize you hated Google so much.”

“Well, they make a lot of stuff in my life more convenient.” Enjolras runs a hand through his hair in mild embarrassment. “But they completely violate privacy rights in a way that could be and has been exploited by everyone from major corporations to the government to the guy across the street hacking into your email via your unprotected WiFi connection.”

“Isn't that your job?”

“What?”

“Preventing it, I mean.” Grantaire puts his cigarette out in what seems to be an actual ashtray, which makes very little sense considering you can't smoke inside bars in New York City. Even e-cigarettes are banned these days, and Grantaire's is very much not e. “So don't you benefit from privacy violations in the long run?”

“No,” Enjolras says shortly. “Anyway, I was trying to ask you about _your_ interests for once. I'm tired of talking. I'm tired of talking about _me_.”

Grantaire looks at him in mild surprise, and then—“Okay. Want to take a trip to midtown?”

“Not particularly.”

“Well, come with me anyway. If you want to hear about architecture.”

Enjolras glances around at Combeferre and Courfeyrac, who are packing up their things, consulting with one another in low voices. 

“Unless you have plans?” Grantaire says.

“No. Let's go.”

Grantaire leads Enjolras onto the 6 and back to midtown, his least favorite part of New York. It represents everything he's come to hate about the city: the money, the whiteness, the materialism, the way culture is commodified, I heart New York t-shirts and consulting firms that pay their top execs more than the average American makes in ten years, 5th Ave and Times Square as concepts but also as hotbeds of everything wrong with the city (and the city as a microcosm of American society, which doesn't always work but, Enjolras thinks, works here)—but Enjolras goes nonetheless, spends the entire 20 minute subway ride sitting next to Grantaire with his hands jammed in his coat pockets and no idea what to say.

“Look at that guy,” Grantaire half-whispers, gesturing to a man dressed in all black whom Enjolras had been trying to ignore. “Would you believe me if I told you he's one of the most celebrated street artists in the world?”

Other than the all black clothing, the man is so nondescript that even his face seems blurry. Unlike Grantaire's, his hands are not stained with ink or paint. He carries his phone and a worn backpack, and he's wearing white sneakers that gleam shinier than any pair of wingtips Enjolras has ever owned.

“Yeah,” Enjolras says.

“He's not,” Grantaire says, laughing, bouncing his knee up and down. His arm is on the seat behind Enjolras, and he's as tactile as usual but it feels weirdly charged this time. “He's just some guy.”

“Fuck off,” Enjolras says, elbowing him lightly, and Grantaire laughs again, harder this time. It's hard not to join in with this, the lightheartedness of it: even Enjolras's best friends have started to feel like work lately, less time spent enjoying one another's company and more spent figuring out if they're good enough to decrypt Russian communications lines despite none of them speaking any Russian, Courfeyrac double-checking the legality and Combeferre ruminating on the implications and connotations of the Russian word for “cyberterrorism.” This is different, this new friendship, and maybe Enjolras has been wrong all along. Maybe it's important to have friends who aren't engineers, friends who don't spend all day thinking about or committing acts of cyber espionage and cyber theft. 

But then they get off the subway, and Grantaire sticks one of his ever-present cigarettes in his mouth and texts someone on his iPhone, and the feeling goes away.

“Come on,” Grantaire says. “It's this way.”

“You have to be fucking kidding me,” Enjolras says. “I mean—seriously? This?”

Grantaire's face goes from serious to grinning so quickly that Enjolras gets whiplash at the suddenness of it. 

“I know,” he says. “It's cliché. I'm bringing you up to the Empire State Building for our first date. But there's a reason behind it, I promise.”

Enjolras stares at him, dumbfounded, and Grantaire bursts out in his infectious laughter. 

“Come on,” he says. “I know a back way in.”

“This isn't,” Enjolras says. “I mean, I'm not—we—”

“I'm just fucking with you,” Grantaire says. “Re _lax_.” He draws out the last syllable, waves at the guard at a side entrance of the building, then slides them past another (his hand grabbing at Enjolras's wrist, so warm it's almost burning, to drag him around corners and steer him through the maze of corridors behind the building's lobby). He tugs a blank white card out of his pocket and taps it to get them into the elevator, then taps it again to take them up to the observation deck.

“Jesus,” Enjolras says. “Artists have more connections than I thought.”

“I wasn't always this awesome and successful,” Grantaire says, cheerfully lighting another cigarette despite the fact that they're in the fucking Empire State Building. “I used to pick up odd jobs. That dude and I used to be bouncers at this club in Harlem.”

Enjolras's ears pop, which he reacts to by wincing, which makes Grantaire laugh. 

“You must be fun on airplanes,” Grantaire says.

“Not at all,” Enjolras says. “Flying gives me anxiety.” 

The arch in Grantaire's eyebrow drops, just a little, just enough to be noticeable. He takes his cigarette out of his mouth. “Me too,” he says. “Uh—looks like we're here.”

They are: the 102nd floor, streaming with tourists—though less than it would be, Enjolras imagines, if this were summer or Christmas or any time of the year other than the cold cursed month of February this long before Valentine's Day. They're high enough up that Enjolras starts to feel his usual flood of heights-driven anxiety, but he forces himself to breathe, to recall his therapist's coping strategies. 

Things he knows: thousands if not millions of people have stood where he's standing right now, and the building has never caved in on him. There are safety nets to catch jumpers that would save their lives, and they would probably also catch him if he fell. Grantaire is next to him, a solid, steadying force.

Enjolras looks around instead of down. “You know, I've worked in midtown since college, went to Columbia, the works—but I've never actually been up here?”

“Well, it's a tourist trap, you're right about that,” Grantaire says, hand back at Enjolras's wrist, half-dragging him to the edge. “But you can see _everything_. Nothing around it is tall enough to obscure your view, see? I used to date a guy who lived in a super tall building in FiDi with a great rooftop deck—but if you're not the tallest building in FiDi, you can't see shit.”

“You used to date someone who lived in the financial district?”

Grantaire nods, though he isn't facing Enjolras. “Super briefly. Mostly just sex. And he paid for my drugs, which was nice.”

“Which drugs?”

“Coke when I was partying, opium when I was working, weed the rest of the time.” He finds where he wants to be at last, winks at a tourist and then lightly shoves her aside, and leans over the railing with Enjolras. (Things he knows: thousands if not millions of people have done this. The railing has always been able to support their weight.)

“Opium. Like—heroin?” Enjolras thinks of Combeferre's Suboxone.

“Sometimes.” Grantaire exhales, looks out at the city. “Mostly actual opium, though, like in a pipe or sometimes in tea. If we couldn't get it he preferred me to take morphine—stop looking at me like that. Like I said, it was super brief.”

“How brief is super?”

“Like two months? Maybe three?”

“Do you still—”

“No.” Grantaire puts his cigarette out and shoves the butt back in the pack, doing that sudden smile again when he sees the look on Enjolras's face. “Can't litter from this high up. I think the net thing would just catch it, and then my guard buddy wouldn't be so willing to let me in any time I want.”

“Did he give you the card too?”

“What?”

“The card you used to get us onto the elevator.”

“Oh. Yeah he did.” Grantaire smiles at Enjolras, all teeth, and then says, “Okay, so I did bring you here with an actual point in mind, I didn't just want to like—woo you in the literal most stereotypical place in the world other than _maybe_ the Eiffel Tower.”

“Or on a gondola.”

“Right, or on a gondola.” Grantaire points, and Enjolras sees it: the Chrysler Building, sticking out of the bland skyscrapers surrounding it, pointy, those little triangles littered across its face. It is a pretty building, Enjolras supposes. “The Chrysler Building. A triumph of architecture, art, beauty, aesthetic, even capitalism—I mean it's called the fucking Chrysler Building—it's my favorite thing in New York.”

“Really? More than your favorite restaurant, or your favorite bar, or your apartment, or the gallery your art is in—”

“Yes,” Grantaire says. “There are galleries and restaurants and bars everywhere. There's only one Chrysler Building.”

“But there are skyscrapers everywhere,” Enjolras says. “Argument doesn't _quite_ hold up.”

“Nothing else looks like it, right? Like—people build new skyscrapers all the time, right, there's the Burj Khalifa and like the Sears Tower or whatever, but nothing looks like _this_. It's a masterpiece—I—can I explain it to you?”

“Sure,” Enjolras says. “I—yeah, please.”

“I mean, skyscrapers in general.” Grantaire gestures outward. “They don't make any sense, right? When they were first built, they weren't _homes_ —it's not like it was to prevent urban sprawl, you know? New York's first skyscrapers were built as a desperate attempt to demonstrate American ingenuity at a time when the American economy was crashing so hard that the people who built it were basically slaves.” He brings his fingers to his lips, apparently forgetting that he's not holding a cigarette, then moves them down, holding onto the railing, leaning over it. “And building something like this—it's a defiance of gravity. It's a 'fuck you' to God.”

“You think the people who built the Chrysler building were—”

“Giving God the middle finger, yeah.” Grantaire glances over at Enjolras, half smiling. “You've read Genesis?”

“From the Bible?”

“Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth."

“You're not calling the Empire State Building the Tower of Babel.”

“Haven't you been paying attention? I'm calling the Chrysler Building the Tower of Babel. The Empire State Building is—” he waves a hang dismissively at their surroundings. “An afterthought. Whatever. Competition. Djokovic's athleticism in the face of Federer's legacy. Ron Harper, even.” He is watching Enjolras more carefully now, like he's waiting for something.

It clicks for Enjolras immediately: “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do.”

Grantaire smiles, wide and unself-conscious, and Enjolras thinks that he's beginning to understand him at last.

“And nothing that they do will now be impossible for them,” Grantaire says. 

“So it really is just a middle finger to God.”

“I don't think it's that far-fetched. We're a Christian society in a Judeo-Christian world ruled by Abrahamic religion and the strife it causes.” 

“So why'd you bring me here?”

“You tell me,” Grantaire says. 

“Are you comparing me to the Tower of Babel?”

Grantaire doesn't answer except to give Enjolras that same smile. He turns back around to face the Chrysler Building and the other much less decorative buildings surrounding it.

“When William Van Alen planned it, people thought the spire was bullshit. Like, just a way to get people on the street to look up at the building—which, sure, I mean, yeah? But isn't that the point? Why make buildings beautiful at all if you don't want anyone to look at them?” Grantaire gazes at it. “It was the tallest building in the world because of that spire. For eleven whole months.” He whirls around, squinting up the side of the Empire State Building. “Then this ugly behemoth took over.” He turns back around. “Look at the circles at the top. It's supposed to be a crown, which makes sense because if any one building could be a monarch, it'd be this one. I don't even—look at the lights.” Grantaire pauses, just watches, and Enjolras looks, too.

The Chrysler Building is beautiful, Enjolras can understand that. It doesn't take an artist to recognize its elegance, especially in the face of the magnificent but overwrought Empire State Building. _This is only the beginning of what they will do._ Enjolras remembers the Old Testament from a childhood in suburban churches. God hated the Tower of Babel, hated that his people were brought together, hated the possibility that they might have power that surpassed even his. _And nothing that they do will now be impossible for them._

Grantaire is full of shit. He twists Enjolras's words, claims he doesn't believe in Enjolras's cause, relentlessly picks Enjolras's arguments apart. He looks at Enjolras with curious blankness, wears sunglasses so often Enjolras can barely tell if Grantaire even has eyes at all sometimes, puts up a literal smokescreen constantly.

And yet here he is, showing Enjolras the Chrysler Building, and Enjolras doesn't know Grantaire well but he's half sure that what this is—is a declaration. A promise.

“You think I could do it?” Enjolras says. “Change the world?”

“I think you'll try,” Grantaire says. 

“Will I succeed?”

Grantaire doesn't look at him. “You have a better chance than most people.”

Enjolras follows his gaze back to the Chrysler Building's crown. It's dark outside, and the Chrysler Building's lights gleam back at him. “You're right,” Enjolras says. “It's amazing.” 

“It's gorgeous.”

When Enjolras turns, Grantaire is already looking at him, an indecipherable expression on his face. He pushes up his sunglasses, but it doesn't help, which only serves to frustrate Enjolras more.

“Have you ever heard of 'mamihlapinatapai'?” Grantaire asks. 

“Did you just make that up?”

Grantaire laughs. Genuine warmth, up to his eyes for once. “No, it's from Yaghan, which is a language spoken by one of the indigenous groups in Chile.”

“So you speak indigenous South American languages now.”

“No. Only one person alive speaks it.” There's something like regret in his voice. “We should get Marius to learn.”

“What does it mean?” 

“What?”

“Mami—whatever.”

“It's supposed to be the most succinct word in the world,” Grantaire says. “People use it in, like, game theory.”

“I studied game theory,” Enjolras says. “I think I would've remembered that.”

“I doubt that.”

“Do you?”

“It wouldn't help you start the rev or whatever.”

“So?”

“So isn't that all you care about remembering?”

Enjolras looks at him, unimpressed, and is surprised when Grantaire laughs again. 

“So are you going to tell me what it means, or—”

“It's the feeling you get when two people share an expressive and meaningful moment, both looking at each other, wanting something, neither of them knowing whether or not to ask.”

“That's a lot of meaning for one word,” Enjolras says. Grantaire bites down on the right corner of his lower lip. Enjolras's fingers start to rise to his own mouth, but he notices quickly enough, forces himself not to touch.

“Yeah,” Grantaire says faintly.

Gamely, Enjolras calls his bluff.

“So are you going to do it?” he asks.

“What?”

“Ask.”

“Ask what?” Grantaire's eyes haven't left Enjolras's, not even to look down at Enjolras's waiting mouth.

“Fine,” Enjolras says. “I'll ask.”

Grantaire's eyes are wide, his lips ever so slightly parted.

“Can I—” Enjolras says.

“Yes,” Grantaire says immediately.

As kisses go, it's a good one, Enjolras decides. A little cliché to have it here, in the kind of place people have literally made movies about kissing for the first time in, but it could be worse. They could be in Paris. Or on a gondola.

And Grantaire is—Enjolras isn't sure what he expected, but Grantaire kisses like he's arguing, gives a little, takes a little, pulls back slightly as if to assess damage, decides all is well, comes in even harder. He kisses with an edge, teeth just nipping at Enjolras's lower lip every time he pauses to look, and they're still leaning over the railing but it doesn't seem to bother Grantaire, and Enjolras realizes that he can't feel the metal digging into his side either so long as he just focuses on—this.

It's over too quickly, Grantaire pulling away for one final time and looking at anything other than Enjolras's face.

“Sorry,” he says. “I shouldn't have—”

“No,” Enjolras says. “I liked it. I—I mean, I initiated. If you don't want—”

“It's not that,” Grantaire says.

“What is it then?”

He doesn't say anything. 

“Grantaire.”

“We shouldn't do this.” Grantaire runs a hand distractedly through his hair. “I really need a cigarette.”

“Is everything—”

“Everything's fine.” Grantaire looks at Enjolras, smiles at him brightly. Beyond him, the sky is almost completely dark, and it registers for Enjolras that Grantaire is putting his sunglasses back on anyway. “I just—you know. Addict and all.”

“Did I do something wrong?” Enjolras asks carefully.

Even though Grantaire is wearing sunglasses, Enjolras sees his face change.

“No.” A pause that feels like a sigh. “You didn't do anything wrong.” He reaches out with one hand, strokes a thumb along Enjolras's jaw. “Let's get out of here,” he says again.

Enjolras catches Grantaire's wrist, feels how quick his pulse is, and doesn't bring it up. “Grantaire.”

“It's _fine_.” A half-smile, then he tugs his wrist away from Enjolras and leaves.

With no other choice, Enjolras follows.

*

For Enjolras, anxiety is an endless racing of thoughts, a mind too full to focus, neither the corded tension of Grantaire's nor the dull but deeply unsettling aches Combeferre used to get.

But though he doesn't experience anxiety physically, it helps sometimes to force his body to move, as though by exercising his limbs he can jolt his mind into recognition of the fact that it, too, must function.

He's lucky enough to live on the northwestern border of Morningside Heights, his apartment building overlooking the Hudson River and Riverside Park. Usually, Enjolras ignores the trails, preferring to duck behind trees for momentary respite from the frenzy of both his everyday life and the city he's chosen to call his home, tiny blocks of time where he's sure no one can see or hear him, where no one knows where he is or why he's there. In an age of constant surveillance, the shade beneath a dense thicket of trees feels oddly freeing, and it gives Enjolras room to breathe for once.

But today, there is at least a foot of snow blocking Enjolras from his favorite set of trees, so instead he wanders onto the shoveled and salted trail, getting as close to the river as he can without actually falling in. 

The Hudson is half-frozen, and the ice looks strong and white close to both its banks. In the center, though, it fractures, giving way to the murky black depths of highly polluted (and potentially radioactive, Enjolras thinks, considering the nearby site of the Manhattan Project) river water. 

When he was younger, Enjolras swears he can remember the river freezing over completely, leaving a thick trail of ice from Poughkeepsie to Battery Park. He might have made up the memory—his therapist mentioned it once, said it might be a coping mechanism or maybe a misinterpretation of an old dream—but he's sure he once ice skated on the Hudson, young, slipping and sliding around while both his laughing parents skated after him, one taking pictures and the other reaching out to ensure he didn't hurt himself.

But neither of his parents remembers skating on the Hudson, and anyway the chances that either of them would have had time to take him on a day trip like that when he was younger are slim to none. 

It's cold outside, a brisk wind forcing Enjolras to huddle into his scarf and wrap his coat as tightly around himself as he can, but he walks anyway. He likes that his mind starts coming up with ways to beat the cold and stops thinking about everything else—Grantaire, Les Amis, an upcoming protest, French and Iranian proxies, contact information for dangerous people. He likes forcing himself to focus on putting one foot in front of the other, careful not to slip on the places where ice has beaten even diligent salting, and he likes watching his breath steam up in front of him.

It occurs to him that he could manufacture the effect year-round if he picked up smoking.

He thinks about how much he used to hate cigarettes and how he feels almost fond of them now. It doesn't make any sense, and it doesn't help him ground himself in his current reality, so he sighs (a big breath, a big cloud) and walks back to his apartment.

*

There's a massive protest in Union Square that half Les Amis plan to take part in, and Enjolras is no exception, ducking out of work an hour early to get there in time.

Several thousand people fill the park and the surrounding streets, and Enjolras can't find Courfeyrac or Combeferre, but Feuilly and Grantaire materialize out of seemingly nowhere.

“There he is,” Grantaire says, giving Enjolras a lazy smile that betrays none of the skittishness he showed at the Chrysler Building the last time they saw each other two weeks ago. Enjolras's heartbeat quickens and, irritated by it, Enjolras forces himself to ignore it. “Our fearless leader.”

“You've escaped,” Feuilly says, throwing an arm around Enjolras's shoulders as Grantaire unrolls a poster painted with a series of birds, wings spread as they take flight, above a slogan with a hashtag in front of it. He hands it to Enjolras.

“I feel like the white dude should get to hold this one,” Grantaire says. Oddly, his face hasn't changed since Enjolras last saw him: that same bend in his nose, that same crooked smile, that same stubble, ever-present smear of charcoal on his chin. “Feuilly, I made this one with you in mind.”

“Really?” Feuilly says. “Looks more like you made it for Courfeyrac.”

It's true: the poster boasts a painting of a Twitter feed, and of the two of them, Courfeyrac is infinitely more likely to follow Twitter than is Feuilly.

“You made these?” Enjolras says.

“Yeah, Courfeyrac asked me if I had time to do a couple and I did, so—Feuilly, let me share that one with you, it's huge.”

Enjolras stares at him, more than a little baffled. “Courfeyrac asked you to? When? You weren't at the meeting last week.”

Grantaire's eyes flick up to meet Enjolras's. “He texted me. He and Bahorel have the others.”

“And you said yes?”

“Of course I said yes,” Grantaire says, taking his position on Feuilly's other side. “I am a part of the ABC, you know, and I only bring one skill to the table. Might as well use it.”

Enjolras thinks about Grantaire's emails, the dance class he teaches, and decides that Grantaire is either severely underestimating his own skills or lying for comic effect. They're standing too far apart for Enjolras to try to assess which, so he settles on focusing on the protest, his reason for being here in the freezing cold in the first place.

At the center of the park, the woman leading the protest is speaking: the inclement weather has prevented them from marching, but they're going to occupy Union Square for as long as it's sustainable. She promises to warn them before the snow gets bad enough for the mayor to call a state of emergency—“I know the hipsters need to know if the L train is running, but for most of us it's all about the M, the F, and the G, and you know the L's already fucked enough,” she announces, to uproarious cheers.

Enjolras, who lives uptown and can count the amount of times he's taken the L train in the last year on one hand, glances over at Feuilly.

“I don't know,” Feuilly says. “I take the N straight home.”

“Helpful,” Enjolras says.

“You need to move out of Manhattan,” Grantaire says around Feuilly. “I can't believe you're seriously here. It's, like, the worst borough for anyone even remotely interested in activism.”

“I live in Harlem.”

“Barely.”

“I'm, like, down the street from the Apollo,” Enjolras says, and then immediately regrets it: Grantaire raises his eyebrow, half-smiles, rolls his eyes.

“I don't think you're allowed to claim the Apollo,” Grantaire says. “You could be the phantom at the Apollo and you still wouldn't be allowed to claim the Apollo, I don't care how much you look like him.”

“Do you want to switch spots?” Feuilly says, and Grantaire laughs.

“I'm good here,” he says, tapping a cigarette out of its pack and offering it to Feuilly, who accepts. Enjolras forces himself to look ahead of himself instead of around Feuilly, feeling irrationally irritated that Feuilly is there at all.

They stand there for a while, but the protest stays surprisingly peaceful, possibly because the forecast says they're supposed to get a foot and a half of snow starting in an hour. The mayor's announcement eventually comes to all of their phones at once, and the crowd starts to dissipate, crowding into the NQR and L-train stops.

“Fuck,” Grantaire says, watching as literal hundreds of sets of beards, man-buns, and crooked bangs flood down the stairs. “The last thing I wanna do is go home with them.”

“It's that or the NQR to transfer to literally everything else,” Feuilly says. “You're getting off lucky.”

“I thought you worked on Thursdays,” Enjolras says.

“Yeah, which means by the time I need to go home, the NQR will be shut the fuck down.”

“Good luck,” Grantaire says. Feuilly tries to hand him his poster, but Grantaire shakes his head: “My apartment is too full of shit. Just take it to the Musain or something if you don't want it.”

Feuilly tucks it under his arm, departing in the opposite direction on foot, and Grantaire looks at Enjolras.

“You gonna ride that NQR and try your luck at Times Square?”

“I guess that's my only option.” Enjolras frowns, trying to reconcile the Grantaire who makes posters for the ABC when he's asked—for free—with the Grantaire who thinks all of their endeavors are pointless.

“You should come to Bushwick.”

It doesn't make any sense. Either Grantaire sits around talking about how nothing they do has worth, or he makes art for them of his own volition? Who does that? Why? “For what?” 

“For—I don't know. Dinner.”

Enjolras stares at him. “With you?”

Grantaire exhales, clouded breath from cold air instead of cigarette smoke for once. “That's the idea, yeah.”

Enjolras considers it: Grantaire is right that his train line will be hectic as all hell for the next few hours, and if he gets stuck in Brooklyn, he can always swing by Jehan and Combeferre's apartment. 

“Okay,” he says. “But can we walk west and take the L from there?”

Grantaire laughs. “Good idea.”

They ride the train in semi-silence this time, Grantaire oddly stiff and formal next to him for once, looking anywhere but at Enjolras.

“Did I do something wrong?” Enjolras says.

“Why do you keep saying that?” Grantaire says, still not looking at him.

“I don't know, you were just—we haven't talked in a while. I thought you might have been uncomfortable. We don't have to—” Enjolras stops, tries to think of what to say. “I mean, I don't really know what I'm doing here, and if you don't want to—like, we don't have to be anything than what we are.”

“And what are we, exactly?”

“We're—friends.”

“Friends.” In profile, the bend in Grantaire's nose, the spot where it has clearly been broken, is even more obvious. He smiles, a little bitterly. “Do you kiss all your friends at the most-period-romantic-period-spot-period-in-the-world-period?”

“Only the ones who talk like you.”

“Who talks like me?”

“Just you, from what I can tell.”

“You say that to all the boys?”

“Why did you invite me to dinner if you didn't want to hang out?”

Grantaire turns to Enjolras at last, biting down on his lower lip. Up close, the dark circles under his eyes look even darker, the hollows in his cheeks more pronounced. What was it he'd said? Opium? “I did want to hang out—I do.”

“I can't tell if you're, like, about to reject me over dinner or what.”

“I don't think Queen Elizabeth herself would reject you.”

“I doubt I'm her type. Not nearly—ruddy enough.”

“Ruddy?” Grantaire says. “You mean Charles? I was talking about the other one. Virgin Queen? The Good Queen Bess?”

When Enjolras shrugs, Grantaire groans aloud. “You are seriously the worst. We need to have, like, historical figures' weird nicknames on flashcards for you or something.”

He stands up while the train is still moving, shoves his fists deep in his pockets, and motions for Enjolras to follow him with one shoulder. 

Grantaire's apartment is a three and a half minute walk from the subway, but Grantaire stops in at least two liquor stores, a bodega, and two vegetable stands before they finally reach his walk-up. The apartment itself is Grantaire writ large (or at least Bushwick-medium), white-grey surfaces everywhere stained at the corners with charcoal, one sprawling bedroom with one sprawling bed, one locked closet Grantaire says he keeps old art in, the faint scent of cigarettes and Fabreeze. 

“So this is it,” Grantaire says, pointing Enjolras to a table littered with sketchpads and empty bottles. “My humble abode.”

“It's nice,” Enjolras says. “Bigger than I expected.”

“Rent-controlled,” Grantaire says. “I hope you like squash.” 

It's jarring but oddly pleasing, watching Grantaire chop up shallots and throw them into a frying pan as if he's a cook and not an artist. Enjolras knows, on an intellectual level, that someone like Grantaire must be meticulous: the sketches on the table, three or four different versions of the bird poster, prove that. But it feels strange to see it in person anyway, to see Grantaire mince garlic with a knife as big as his arm and taste test with one of a series of metal spoons that he tosses immediately into the sink after using. He hums and shimmies around while he works, something classical, something Enjolras is sure he's heard before.

“You look weirdly professional at this,” Enjolras says.

“I was a cook for like a month,” Grantaire says. “I got fired, though. They didn't like that I was drinking the cooking wine straight out of the bottle.”

He says it like it's a joke, but Enjolras notices that Grantaire actually is uncorking a bottle of wine, and he passes a glass to Enjolras before pouring one for himself and then throwing some in the pan.

Enjolras, who rarely drinks, takes a sip. “This is good,” he says.

“You don't have to drink it,” Grantaire says. “I'm just being polite.”

“No, I don't—I'll have a little.”

Grantaire cooks them some combination of vegetables and fish that actually tastes amazing, and Enjolras, who eats takeout almost every day for lunch and can't remember the last time he actually had something home-cooked other than eggs and dry chicken, devours it. 

“This is the best thing I've eaten in, like, months.”

“I'm a pro, dude, I told you. Well—former pro.” Grantaire drinks more of his wine, and Enjolras notes that at some point Grantaire switched to red. 

They eat in only slightly awkward silence, and Enjolras feels, the entire time, a rash and barely-stifled desire to reach out and grab the hand Grantaire keeps almost perpetually wrapped around the stem of his glass, or to lean over the cluttered table and kiss him again, or to run his fingers through Grantaire's hair, which is not a way he's very used to feeling. 

“Grantaire,” Enjolras says, after Grantaire has stood up to clear their plates.

“Yeah.”

“I—I'll do the dishes. Only fair.”

“You don't have to,” Grantaire says. “Dishwasher. Best investment of my life.”

The dishwasher, it turns out, is still full of yesterday's dishes, and Grantaire pulls them out and shoves them haphazardly into a cupboard but lets Enjolras load the new ones in, at least, before lighting a cigarette and cracking the closest window open to let out the smoke.

“How was your day,” Grantaire says, oddly flatly, like it isn't a question. He's huddled on the sill, not even looking at Enjolras.

“Boring.”

“Do you even like your job?”

“It pays the bills. Helps fund the ABC. Feeds me.”

“So you like being a computer nerd.”

“Yeah, I—yeah.”

Grantaire turns to stare across his apartment at Enjolras. “You don't seem the type.”

“Don't I?”

“No. All the computer nerds I know are like, dudes who never go outside. You're charismatic and outgoing. You talk to people constantly. You,” he says, and then stops, looking back out the window and falling silent as if he's forcibly biting back words. “You're good at talking.”

“I wasn't always.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I—I mean, I'm like this because of therapy and medication and because I think—I guess that I think that people are worthwhile, so I want to be social and sociable, not just because it's the normal thing but because if I want to change the world for the sake of humanity, I feel like I have to be able to understand that humanity.”

“And—what, computers help you do that?”

Enjolras shrugs. “When I was having trouble with the world when I was younger, they let me tap out of it. When I was learning how people worked, they were the key. And then they were a method of connection—a way for me to talk to people everywhere about everything. I learned French and Latin because my parents made me take classes, but I learned Arabic because I was on Arabic-language forums in 2009 before the Arab Spring.” He blows hair out of his eyes. “That's why you like art, isn't it? The human connection.”

“I already told you,” Grantaire says, blowing smoke out his cracked open window. “I like art because it's blasphemous.”

“But you said it yourself. The Tower of Babel was only dangerous because it allowed for universality among humans. A way to know each other. The most powerful thing in the world. And isn't the Tower of Babel just—a computer?”

Grantaire carries his ash tray and cigarettes over to wear Enjolras is sitting, leaving his window open despite the terrible weather. 

“You figured me out, Apollo,” he says, but when he meets Enjolras's eyes, there it is again, that blankness.

Grantaire smiles, and Enjolras forces himself to look away.

“I should get going,” Enjolras says. “Before the storm gets too bad and I can't get back into Manhattan. I owe you dinner, by way.”

“You gonna cook for me?”

“I don't really cook.”

“Are you bad at it, or do you just not do it?”

“It always felt like a waste of time,” Enjolras says. “I mean, I can like, provide for myself, but I can't make anything like this.” He gestures to the dishwasher. “I could probably learn, I guess.”

“You don't have to take cooking classes just to return the favor,” Grantaire says. “Buy me a drink next week and we'll call it even.”

“No, I—let's have dinner.”

“We just had dinner.”

“I mean at a restaurant. Together. Like—like a date.”

“Yes,” Grantaire says immediately, but it comes out like an accident. 

“Are you—really?”

“Yeah. Yes, yes, sorry. Yes, of course I want go out with you, you're—” Grantaire puts his cigarette out in a different ashtray. “Yes.”

“Oh,” Enjolras says, feeling the smile spread across his face. “Okay. Great.”

Grantaire smiles back at him, a little helplessly. “Yeah,” he says. “Great.”

*

“A date,” Courfeyrac repeats.

He's at Combeferre and Jehan's when Enjolras gets there thirty minutes later via triple surge charged Uber, and he's looking at Enjolras so skeptically that Enjolras throws his hands up, sloshing tea everywhere.

“What was I supposed to do?” Enjolras says. “I'm not you, Courfeyrac, I don't do this every weekend.”

“I object to that,” Jehan says from where he's curled up next to the electric fireplace. “I'd say he only does it every other weekend.”

“So he asked you, and you were … what? Like, a deer caught in headlights?”

“Courfeyrac,” Enjolras says. “ _I_ asked _him_.” 

Courfeyrac actually chokes on his tea at that, taken, for once, by legitimate surprise. 

“It's not that surprising, honestly, Courfeyrac,” Jehan says. “I'm surprised you haven't noticed.”

“I _have_ noticed,” Courfeyrac says. “I just didn't expect Enjolras to act this fully out of character. I mean, you hardly know him, you seem to have asked him out impulsively, you went to his fucking apartment during a snowstorm for no perceivable purpose—what is up with you?”

“I know him pretty well,” Enjolras says, which makes Courfeyrac gape at him.

“Don't tell me you two hooked up,” Courfeyrac says. “When? How long? What the fuck is—”

“We just kissed. Once. Once! Two weeks ago. It was nothing, it was—we just hung out after a meeting, and—” The details feel suddenly too private, though, and Enjolras shrugs rather than continue. “I just like him. It's so—I don't want to say it's uncomplicated, because it's not, and I can't tell what he's thinking half the time or if he even likes me back—”

“He literally worships you,” Courfeyrac says.

“—but it's nice to have something not related to computers in my life,” Enjolras says. “That's healthy, right?”

Jehan smiles. “Absolutely.”

“I'll have Combeferre re-vet him,” Courfeyrac says.

“Where _is_ Combeferre?”

“Held up at work. Date. Spying on the U.N. Who knows?”

“Date?” Enjolras says, because it seems the least likely of the three. “With whom?”

“I don't know, some girl,” Courfeyrac says. “He won't tell me. Probably Eponine, he's had a crush on her for ages.”

“Eponine the bartender?”

“Honestly, Enjolras, you need to start paying more attention,” Jehan says.

“Yeah, how many Eponines do you know? But she never showed interest back, and I think he might've actually thought she and Grantaire were a thing, but—I mean, clearly not—”

“Clearly not,” Enjolras says dully.

*

“Grantaire, _pay attention_.”

Enjolras says it by accident while someone else is talking, a discussion of Les Amis' plan to join forces with a New York City charity group that feeds children during the summer. Grantaire, who usually cares about meetings only when they involve an argument about theory or something computer-related, flicks his eyes from the ceiling to Enjolras. 

There isn't a cigarette in his hand for once, but his shuttered expression betrays nothing. He swirls his glass a little and takes a sip. Around them, the Musain has gone quiet.

“Why?” Grantaire says.

“We're talking about a real solution to a long-standing problem that New York City children face every summer. The least you could do is pretend to want to help.”

“Why?” Grantaire says.

“Because you're _here_.”

“Does my presence here mean I have to care about every failed cause you hopeless idealists take on?” Grantaire says. 

“How is this a failed cause?”

“Do I have to explain?”

“ _Yes_.”

“Okay,” Grantaire says, and he doesn't even have the decency to set his chair back down on all four of its legs. “Here's what you do: you raise a few thousand dollars. You feed a few hundred kids sandwiches. At night, the kids go back to homes where their parents can't afford to feed them even with government aid. Mostly they're hungry and lack energy, because how many calories can you really afford to give them? That means they don't play a ton of sports, they have health issues later in life, they can't focus on school because they're too busy being hungry. Even if you save a few of them.” Grantaire shrugs. “What's the point?”

“You just said it,” Bahorel says. “Saving a few kids is the point.”

Grantaire barely spares him a glance. “One billion children worldwide live in poverty. That's a seventh of the world, and half the children in it. Tell me how feeding a few hundred of them does anything. It's just one tiny drop in a giant ocean of shittiness.” 

“So since we can't save them all, we shouldn't save any?”

It's Feuilly who talks this time, but Grantaire is looking at Enjolras when he responds. “Like I said. Pointless things don't interest me.”

*

Enjolras corners Grantaire outside after the meeting, and Grantaire looks up at him as dispassionately as he ever has, dark coat open over dark hoodie making him look bigger than he is. He lights a cigarette. Enjolras distantly remembers a time when he hated the scent of cigarette smoke. He's not sure why, but it doesn't bother him as much anymore.

“What's wrong, Apollo?” Grantaire says. “Upset I haven't totally changed my mind just because we were going to go out this weekend?”

“Why the past tense?” Enjolras says, and Grantaire blinks at him, expression momentarily giving way to something else. “I want to know what your fucking problem is, not cancel.”

There it is again, and Enjolras gets it this time: curiosity. 

“I don't have a problem,” Grantaire says. “I just think this—” he gestures to the Musain behind him, and his breath comes out in small puffs that Enjolras can't distinguish from cigarette smoke “—is a waste of time and effort. You're going to end poverty?”

“You said you thought if anyone could do it, I could.”

“I said you have a better chance than most people of success,” Grantaire says. “That doesn't mean I think you'll do it.”

“Why are you here?”

“What?”

“Why are you here? You don't believe in this. You don't believe in anything. You're apathetic to a fault, the only thing I've ever seen you care about is a fucking _building_ , and you barely pay attention in meetings unless it's to tear me apart. What's your deal? Why are you here?”

“I believe in some things,” Grantaire says.

“Tell me one.”

Grantaire kisses him. It's so sudden that Enjolras's mouth is still half-open from talking, and Grantaire tastes like cigarette smoke and whiskey. He shoves Enjolras bodily up against the brick wall of the Musain, pelvis to pelvis, and it's cold against Enjolras's back, something Grantaire must realize because he pulls away for a second, examining Enjolras's face.

“Okay?” he says.

“Yes,” Enjolras says back, wanting for a moment nothing more than to get Grantaire closer. He buries a hand in Grantaire's hoodie and tugs until Grantaire kisses him again, open-mouthed, sloppy. This close, Enjolras can feel the tension corded in every line of Grantaire's body, an odd kind of cognitive dissonance when coupled with his apparent apathy, the lazy curl of his mouth, the way he looks up at the ceiling like he couldn't care less if he floated right through it.

“You want me to tear you apart?” Grantaire says, dragging Enjolras back into the moment by gripping Enjolras's other wrist in one hand and then pressing it to the wall above Enjolras's head, fingers so tight it might hurt if Enjolras could feel anything other than a sudden hot flood of desire. Grantaire is so close that Enjolras thinks he can feel his hipbones, and he's absurdly frustrated at the layers of clothing between them. 

There's the ghost of a smile on Grantaire's face, just a little bit menacing, and Enjolras thinks that if he were smart he'd leave now. “Just say the words, Apollo.”

Enjolras doesn't say anything, and Grantaire's lips slide from Enjolras's mouth to his neck, a barely-there touch that nonetheless makes Enjolras hiss, tension in every part of his body.

“In action how like an angel,” Grantaire says softly, breath enough to make the spot tingle. “In apprehension how like—a god,” and Enjolras grinds out a response at last.

“Tell me one,” he says.

Grantaire pulls apart long enough to look Enjolras in the eye. For once, there's nothing even approaching blankness there, which is good, because Enjolras would be terrified if there were. 

“I'll see you this weekend,” Grantaire says, letting go of Enjolras's wrist and walking away, trailing smoke from a new cigarette all the while.

*

_for the record i think you should think bigger_

Enjolras looks at his phone where it vibrates, inches away from his face. It's early enough that he hasn't gotten out of bed yet, but there are pills on his nightstand that have to be taken at the same time every day, a bottle of water with which to chase them, an alarm clock minutes away from going off.

_what do you mean?_ he texts back.

Grantaire's response comes a moment later: _you're always talking about ways to change/save the world. it's obvious that's your goal. go big or go home i mean kids need to eat, but a few hundred is small potatoes & you're capable of so much more than that_

_i thought you said you didn't believe in anything_

Grantaire doesn't respond to that one as quickly, so Enjolras gets up, showers quickly, brushes his teeth, picks out clothes that look reasonably clean.

He's halfway into his first cup of coffee and scrolling through the morning news when Grantaire texts back. 

_i said i believe in some things_


	2. part_ii_quint3ssence_0f_dust.odt

Only (softly, fiercely)  
the stars shining. Here,  
in the room, the bedroom.  
Saying I was brave, I resisted,   
I set myself on fire.  
Louise Glück, “Stars”

* * *

Enjolras doesn't usually drink much, but Grantaire ordered them an expensive bottle of wine and it felt rude to say no, and anyway he doesn't usually date but he's doing that now too apparently, and so when Grantaire poured him his first glass, Enjolras smiled and fell back on years of wine-tastings with his parents.

“Buttery. And—zesty, too,” he said, to delighted laughter from Grantaire, and now they're hand-in-hand stumbling down the streets of East Williamsburg.

Dizzyingly tipsy, warm and giddy off the white wine and this strange new thing between them, laughing off the alcohol and drunk off Grantaire, that peculiar feeling between sleepy and elated that wine gives him, Enjolras stumbles into Grantaire, who slings an arm around his shoulders.

“Let me call you an Uber,” Grantaire says. Snow swirls around them, fat flakes coming to rest in Grantaire's dark hair. His cheeks are wine- and cold-flushed, and there's a heartbreakingly lovely smile on his face, none of its usual irony or bitter edge. For once, Grantaire's cigarettes are tucked away, both his hands occupied with Enjolras.

“No, let's go to yours.”

“Wow, before the third date? I wouldn't have thought you the type.”

“You wouldn't have thought me the type to date at all,” Enjolras says, shoving both hands in his coat pockets and leaning a little more heavily against Grantaire's solid form.

“Yeah, that did surprise me,” Grantaire says. “You really want to come over?”

“Yes.”

“We don't have to—I mean, we can just watch a movie or something.”

Instinctively, Enjolras half-turns and ducks his head to kiss Grantaire's mouth. The stakes are all different this time: they're on a date, not spontaneously kissing from the observation deck at the Empire State Building or outside the Musain. Grantaire likes him, and Enjolras knows it for sure now. They're alone, not a soul around other than a delivery man on a bike, and it's ridiculous to think it, but Enjolras has butterflies, feels like he could float away on a slight breeze except for Grantaire's heavy arm around his shoulders and warm lips against his.

He hasn't felt like this in ages, maybe ever, and Grantaire's cold fingers are fond against the back of Enjolras's neck.

“Okay,” Grantaire says, all warm garlicky breath. “Let's go to my place.”

*

An air-gapped computer is the kind of thing people who steal information from the most powerful government in the world rely on for their trade. It's a computer with a hard drive that's never connected to the internet and so has no trackable data on it. That's the gap: the space between the computer and the entire rest of the world still exists. It's not on the network. It's not in the cloud. The computer, it turns out, is more lonely and disconnected (and human, Enjolras privately thinks—but these are the kinds of thoughts he doesn't share with his therapist) than anyone else on earth. It can be anonymous if it wants, float along without anyone knowing anything about its whereabouts or even its existence, really, and that's what makes it valuable to people like Les Amis.

To make sure it's really untrackable, you buy it in person with cash on a day like Black Friday when Best Buy and Wal-Mart are packed and it's easy to blend in. Then you take the wireless card and the networking card out of the machine in an old car in the parking lot, go home and install whatever you want off a flash drive or a CD you've encrypted with DeepSound so anyone who doesn't know what they're looking for just thinks they're listening to The Beatles Greatest Hits, go to a Starbucks bathroom as far away from your actual apartment as possible on a busy Saturday afternoon, put the wireless card and networking card back in, connect through an onion router, and do whatever it is you're trying to do.

It's not necessary for all your work, though, not if you know what you're doing. Enjolras works for a security company, so he's good with a firewall and can encrypt his data pretty easily without having to jump through hoops. He has three air-gapped laptops in a safe in his closet, but he avoids using them unless he has to. He also spends a lot of time stealing his neighbors' wifi—pet names, sports teams, birth dates, the kinds of painfully human mistakes nearly all of them make. A WPA2 connection is usually impractical to hack, but when passwords are set by people, the kinds of people who fall prey to basic phishing schemes asking them what their mothers' maiden names are, it's like a jigsaw puzzle with twenty pieces instead of a thousand. He uses his own connection for some of his illegal work, too, just to shake things up, make himself harder to track. 

He knows if anything gets traced to this apartment building, he'll be the one on the line—the one with the most sophisticated setup, the one security engineer in the building, but hopefully with the right level of encryption he won't get caught anytime soon. Maybe he should move to San Francisco or Washington, where everyone is a security engineer and everyone has weird morals and weirder motivations.

He's been up for what feels like days stealing information from his own company. They do security for enough massive corporations that it would take weeks to sort through all of it, but he has a goal for once. Combeferre says there's some issue, some weird glitch in the code on an American government agency's website when it's accessed from certain places, and Enjolras has access to several VPNs and is personally responsible for the security of several agency websites. This is Combeferre's specialty usually, figuring out the flaws in connections instead of code, but Combeferre's having a rough week at work and so Enjolras is taking the reins. 

It's exhausting, but Enjolras feels like he's aflame all the time. Grantaire mentioned during the ABC meeting earlier that Enjolras must keep himself alive with the fire of righteousness alone, and Enjolras laughed and neglected to mention his slight abuse of Ritalin in the last few days.

Not even the closest members of Les Amis know about the depth of information he's found, though. He texts Combeferre and Courfeyrac, asks them to come over for Netflix and a pizza—their personal code for illegal work, which Courfeyrac helps verify when he can, CS degree and JD going hand in hand—and actually orders the pizza, opens Netflix on his spare laptop, connects it through his own heavily-encrypted wifi connection, sticks it one of Feuilly's lockboxes in his bedroom. 

He likes to watch every connection firing through his router usually, and sometimes he sets up a second screen to watch the exit nodes. Mostly it's just him doing his own thing, but you never know when someone's going to try to hack you, and of late there have been a couple of connections he's not sure of. He's mostly chalked them up to his phone trying to update Facebook and Gmail, forced himself not to think about it, told his therapist that he's not even freaking out about it, watched the lines of disappointment form around her mouth, added more security to his connection. Reasonable doubt, he thinks: of course someone working in infosec would have a heavily-encrypted wifi connection. Why on earth should that mean they're doing something illegal?

Combeferre and Courfeyrac arrive together, six pack in tow, and settle in to talk, batteries safely removed from all three of their phones. 

“That's really, really illegal,” Courfeyrac says, opening a beer and leaning forward to look at Enjolras's computer screen. “If they're actually doing that, it'll expose all kinds of corruption.”

“This could ruin the Internet,” Combeferre says. “Might mean the end of net neutrality, if it ever really existed.”

“It'd force change, though, wouldn't it?” Enjolras says. “It could be a bargaining chip, right?”

“Absolutely.” Combeferre scrolls through what's essentially a data dump, pausing on blocks of text with recognizable words and phrases to skim. “What do you want to do?”

*

“It won't work.”

Yet another meeting, yet another argument. At least, Enjolras thinks, casting a glance toward Grantaire, at least he's talking this time. And at least it's just a few of them at a table, Enjolras talking to Feuilly about a protest.

“Why not?” Feuilly, who has not yet given up on trying to get straight answers out of Grantaire, says.

“Because it relies too much on moral perfection and doesn't allow for human error.”

Feuilly stares at him. Enjolras rolls his eyes.

“I don't need to take advice from someone who smells like an ash tray crashed into a liquor cabinet.”

Feuilly tenses beside Enjolras and both Joly and Bossuet cast sidelong glances at Grantaire, but Grantaire's laughter is genuine. “And charcoal, don't forget that. It's where all my charm comes from.”

Enjolras raises both eyebrows. “I thought you were going to come at me with an insult. 'At least I don't smell like the blood of angry men, Apollo.' 'Better a liquor cabinet than computer grease.'”

“I was going to say you smell like delusions of grandeur and pine trees, but the blood of angry men is a good one, too.”

Enjolras shoves Grantaire lightly and receives a soft head butt to his chest in return. Enjolras buries a hand in Grantaire's dark hair, planning to just give him a quick nuzzle, but Grantaire looks up at him and Enjolras can't resist—the kiss is swift but obvious and public, and when Enjolras separates he sees that every single person in the bar is watching them. 

“Grantaire,” Eponine calls from the bar. “A word?”

“Coming,” Grantaire says, but something shifts in his face. “She'll just want to gossip.”

“How do you two know each other?” Enjolras asks. “College or something?” Eponine looks art school-y, with her teal-streaked hair and row of lip piercings.

“Uh—through Musichetta,” Grantaire says. He pinches Enjolras's cheek. “Be right back, sweetheart.”

“Ugh,” Enjolras says. “Don't.”

“Okay, _baby_.”

“Gross.”

“You love it, though.”

That's a distinct possibility, Enjolras thinks.

*

Enjolras doesn't usually let people he doesn't know well over to his place, and even though he's let Grantaire into his good graces ridiculously quickly, Courfeyrac frowns a little and tells him to be careful. So they compare prescriptions in Grantaire's apartment instead of Enjolras's, Xanax versus Xanax, Ambien and Ambien, the pros and cons of Prozac and Zoloft and Adderall and Ritalin.

“The Adderall's to wake me up after the Ambien knocks me out,” Grantaire says. “Cigarettes for maintenance, alcohol to keep the anxiety down.”

“You mix alcohol with Prozac, Xanax, and Ambien,” Enjolras says.

“Not all four at once usually.” Grantaire lights a cigarette, an odd, always-there motif. Sometimes when Enjolras tries to picture Grantaire, he can't remember what he looks like without the cigarette. He lights it exclusively in moments of stress, Enjolras will figure out later. It's only not there when Grantaire is sitting at the Musain picking apart Enjolras's arguments and one of the bartenders is paying attention, or sometimes when they're hanging out alone. It's a tell, the slip up in a game of poker, and it's only omnipresent because Grantaire is always bluffing. “But sometimes. Sometimes, yeah.”

*

The Hudson, Enjolras notes one evening when he's downtown with Bahorel and Jehan (“Dinner! No talk of politics,” Jehan insisted. “We haven't hung out in _ages_ , honestly—”), has melted almost entirely.

“It's cold,” Jehan says. “They just called our name. Let's go inside.”

Bahorel presses light fingers between Enjolras's shoulders, a gesture he's been making since they were freshmen at Columbia (then to shove him off the elevator when he got too into a conversation and almost missed his floor—now to prod him gently in the direction of their restaurant).

“Honestly,” Bahorel says. “You're so spacey lately. Is everything okay?” 

The question at the end of it— _new meds?_ —is unasked, but that doesn't mean Enjolras doesn't hear it.

“I've been spending a lot of time with Grantaire,” he says, like that's a reasonable response. 

But Bahorel and Jehan accept it, give him knowing smiles, and follow him into the restaurant.

*

“Do you really have no faith in the world?” Enjolras asks.

He's on Grantaire's couch, and soon he needs to retreat to his own apartment and the armored walls, the gun in his nightstand, the over-encrypted WiFi. But for now he's content to stretch out on Grantaire's couch, watching as Grantaire packages a painting so carefully that it's as if he's handling an ancient porcelain vase. 

“How do you have faith in the world?” Grantaire says, folding brown paper over the painting after taking one last look at it. It's a commission, but the patron only wanted a piece of Grantaire's work, so it's one of Grantaire's more original pieces. Enjolras doesn't get art, but he can tell when a work of it is amazing, and this painting takes his breath away every time he thinks about it.

“What do you mean? Like, you want to know the actual process?”

“No, I mean—how does it make sense?” Searching for twine now. Enjolras thinks it's a shame he's covering the painting at all—black canvas, white specks of paint that converge in the center, looking themselves not unlike a galaxy. “The world operates at random. You're a scientist, you know that. Entropy is always increasing, the universe expands, we are insignificant. Why would you have faith in something random like that? It'd be like—like people who have lucky numbers when they're gambling. Either your number is statistically more probable and that's why you feel like you're getting lucky, or it was just coincidence, right?”

“If you have an issue with my phrasing, consider that I didn't mean the entire universe. I only meant the people in it.”

Grantaire doesn't look at Enjolras, only squats in front of the painting to secure the knot. “If faith in people paid off, don't you think the world would be better than it is?”

“You think people are bad?”

“I think people are self-interested.”

“What if it's in their self-interest to act in each other's interest? What if the common good were in their favor?”

“People aren't like that,” Grantaire says. “I don't know if this is human nature or if it's just because of, like, capitalism or whatever, but people look at the world as a zero sum game. What's in the interest of the people isn't in the interest of the person unless individualism is prized even when dealing with the common good.” 

He affixes a mailing label to the painting. 

“The arc of the moral universe bends toward justice,” Enjolras says.

“That's such a heartless view of the world and the people in it. It makes it sound—teleological. Like all the suffering in humanity's past was justifiable because, hey, the arc of the universe bends toward justice.” Grantaire sighs. “If we were going to live in a perfect world, we would've gotten there already. Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years.”

“Yeah, and we've only just stopped killing half our population every year,” Enjolras says. “It's a long arc. MLK said it himself.”

“You're saying injustice will be eradicated by time.”

“I'm saying the world will become more just over time. Not on its own, but—there have always been civil rights leaders, progressive thinkers, revolutionaries.”

Grantaire turns toward Enjolras at last. “And you're one of them.” 

“I hope so.”

The expression on Grantaire's face is unreadable, but his eyes flick toward the closet where he keeps his spare art and he opens his mouth as if to say something else. In the end, he only sighs, sets the painting down, and walks over to Enjolras. He presses two fingers beneath Enjolras's chin to tilt Enjolras's face toward his own, but he only stares down at it, as if trying to figure something out.

“What?” Enjolras says after over a minute of Grantaire's eyes roaming his face.

“Nothing.”

Their faces are only inches apart, so Enjolras cups a hand around the back of Grantaire's neck and pulls him in for a kiss. Grantaire is so gentle that Enjolras wonders for a moment if something is wrong, but Grantaire doesn't move away. If anything, he gets closer, knotting his hand in Enjolras's hair.

“Grantaire,” Enjolras says. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Don't lie to me.”

A smile ghosts across Grantaire's mouth, but it doesn't meet his eyes. 

“Wouldn't dream of it,” Grantaire says.

*

“I mean, I sympathize with being unable to come out, of course I do,” Enjolras is saying after a meeting, sitting at his usual table with Grantaire, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Joly, and Bossuet. They're at the tail end of a particularly heated argument about some of the work Les Amis have been doing of late. “But if it'll work to our advantage, outing male politicians who use male escorts is necessary.”

“It's not just their careers you'll ruin, though,” Grantaire says, leaning back and sipping from his drink, something a murky brown that Enjolras can't place. “It's their families too. And possibly the escorts' lives. Kind of heartless if you ask me.”

“Sex work is a notoriously exploitative industry, though,” Joly says. “Not least because so much of it is illegal. The politicians using escorts are exploiting people who do sex work, no? I say fuck all of them.”

“Et tu, Brute?” Grantaire says, probably to Joly even though his eyes are trained on Enjolras. He's grinning that sideways smile of his, where both of his eyes crinkle even though only one corner of his mouth shoots up. His cigarette is missing, but his fingers are up near his face anyway, thumb brushing against his lower lip.

“Brutus saved Rome,” Enjolras butts in.

“But betrayed his best friend.”

“Well, what's more important?” Enjolras asks. “An empire or a person?”

“Politics or friendship?” Grantaire retorts.

It's a good question and a fair one, and it strikes Enjolras that he's never considered before that the two might be at odds. “Friendship,” he decides.

Grantaire's smile falters for a split second, and then he leans over the table and kisses Enjolras so lightly and briefly that if four of their friends weren't watching them Enjolras might swear he imagined it.

*

It's just so _easy_ with Grantaire. Everything else in his life is dark and intense and complicated, and nothing with Grantaire is like that at all. Well—it's intense, but it's not complicated. Grantaire is light and funny and he kisses Enjolras's cheek in greeting and he's affectionate and touches him all the time, sending sparks down Enjolras's spine. He talks to Enjolras in Arabic and laughs at Enjolras's pronunciation. He watches the news in French with Enjolras sometimes and argues with it loudly despite not speaking the best French, “ _libéralisme n'excuse pas le racisme!_ ” It doesn't hurt that Grantaire is gorgeous, too, unconventionally so, crooked nose, that pout, the line of his shoulders, fall of his hair, curve of his wrist, and Enjolras can't get enough of him. He wants to drink Grantaire in, and it's so distracting that sometimes he forces himself to turn off his phone and focus on work. It's why he never wanted a relationship in the first place, but, he thinks, this is better: it means he has something to lose. It means he has something to fight for.

*

“I'm thinking flash drive, air-gapped computer, Starbucks near Columbia or NYU on a weekend,” Enjolras says. “We work hard until we have all the necessary evidence, send a couple of encrypted emails. I think we'll be set after that.”

“Who do you think we should email?” Combeferre says. 

“I was thinking we start with the NSA or CIA.”

“Why not both?” Courfeyrac says. “I mean—might as well go for the big two at once, right? Increase the likelihood of a response?”

“Yeah, fuck it—we threaten to leak all the information we have about government surveillance, and then—”

“What about the weird connections to agency websites?”

“Should we leave that for later?” Combeferre says.

“No. I think we should do one big hit now.” Enjolras stands up, sips from his coffee, points to one of the folders. “We threaten to leak all of this shit if they don't release the surveillance information themselves. And then we have to actually go through with it. This can't be a war of attrition, or they'll amp up their security and it'll take us months of running code constantly to crack them. They have more manpower and more money than we do.”

“But with more manpower come more people,” Courfeyrac says. “And with more people—”

“Come more bugs, right,” Enjolras says. “But bugs in code written by a thousand people are going to be a lot harder to figure out than bugs written in code by a hundred people.”

“I think that's right,” Combeferre says. “I think we should do one big hit.”

“One big hit,” Courfeyrac says. “Start with the agencies?”

“Yeah. Give the U.S. a chance to stop it before we go nuclear.”

Combeferre smiles grimly. “Not the best way to put it, Enjolras.”

“Good point.”

*

Enjolras rarely goes out, but Courfeyrac insists they all need a break, talks about how heavy all the stuff they've been doing is, says it'll be good for morale, and that's how they all end up pregaming at the Musain for a night out in Williamsburg.

They pass drinks around the table, and Enjolras sips at the same watered down whiskey while the rest of Les Amis go through six rounds of shots courtesy of Musichetta and then declare themselves ready at last.

It's Williamsburg, which is passé enough now that most of the bars lack the social justice hipster gentrifier crowd they would've had ten years ago, the crowd that fills the booths in Bushwick now, but it's Williamsburg, so there are still ample places to go and things to see.

It's still chilly, even this close to spring, but liquored up as everyone is, no one seems to notice.

Grantaire, who is no stranger to drinking heavily, twists around Enjolras. Unlike everyone else, he started drinking long before their ten p.m. meet-up at the Musain, and it shows in the heaviness of his limbs, the easiness of his smile.

“You look pretty,” he says.

“Thanks,” Enjolras says.

Courfeyrac leads them through the slick old snow to a drag bar playing music so loud that Enjolras's ears hurt, and Grantaire heads straight for the bar with Courfeyrac.

They return carrying a tray full of drinks, and Grantaire offers one to Enjolras, who accepts and sips at it so slowly that Grantaire actually rolls his eyes. 

“Drink up, Apollo,” he says, and throws back his own as if to emphasize the point. “I want to dance with you.”

“I don't need to be drunk to dance.”

“No?”

“No.”

Grantaire grins, stands, half-bows and holds out an arm to Enjolras.

“You're such an asshole,” Enjolras says under his breath, but that only makes Grantaire laugh harder. Giddy, he pulls Enjolras closer to the stage, where drag queens are set to come out after midnight. The music playing now is good enough for Grantaire, though, and he wraps his arms around Enjolras, not grinding so much as he is swaying to its beat, gripping Enjolras by the neck every now and then to drag his mouth closer so he can kiss it.

“Do you dance at all?” Grantaire asks, so close that Enjolras can feel his heartbeat against his chest. He read somewhere once that heartbeats mirror each other, that if you get close enough to one they start to beat in sync. He wonders vaguely where he read it, why he was reading that kind of thing instead of something important, and then forgets the thought when he realizes how isolated the corner Grantaire has brought them to is.

“Not often.”

“Shame.”

“Why?”

“I teach a dance class.” Fingers pressing into Enjolras's hips, just enough pain to make Enjolras shudder. “You'd make a fun example partner.”

“Why?”

Grantaire laughs into Enjolras's neck. His breath is warm, and Enjolras pulls Grantaire closer, as close as he can get him. Grantaire buries his head further into Enjolras's neck and waits until Enjolras squeezes to kiss.

Enjolras's reaction is instant: he barely notices that he's thrown his head back before Grantaire laughs, kisses his neck again, follows it with his tongue and then the scrape of his teeth.

“Not here,” Enjolras says.

“Where?”

Enjolras calculates. “Ten minute Uber to your place?”

“At midnight on a Friday? Between Bushwick and Williamsburg? No chance.”

“Maybe you'll just have to keep it in your pants a while longer, then.”

“I'm not the one having trouble,” Grantaire says, shoving his hips forward to prove the point.

The contact is almost too much for Enjolras. “I need another drink.”

“Never thought I'd see the day.”

They drink more, Grantaire downing a double while Enjolras sips at something on ice at the bar, pressed against each other in a crowd of people trying to get more drinks.

“Enjolras, I need to tell you something.”

“What?”

“No, it's—this is serious.”

Grantaire is looking at the bar in front of them, not at Enjolras. He's surveying the alcohol, Enjolras thinks, waiting for the bartender to return to them with a refill. 

“What is it?” Enjolras says, not sure what to expect.

“I love you,” Grantaire says, and around them, Enjolras feels the world go silent.

“What?”

“No matter what. I love you. Do you believe me?”

He barely knows him.

“Yes.”

Grantaire turns to Enjolras, and for the first time, Enjolras sees how drunk he really is: eyes barely focused, breath more whiskey than cigarette for once, elbow leaning heavily on the bar. 

“You shouldn't,” he says. He grips the front of Enjolras's shirt, drags him closer. “I love you.” Barely louder than a breath. A kiss so hard it hurts, mostly tooth, and Enjolras nips back lightly. 

“I love you too,” Enjolras says when they break apart. 

Grantaire stares at him for a long moment, and then smiles helplessly. “Fuck,” he says.

Enjolras isn't sure he understands. 

“Let's go dance with our friends,” Grantaire says, and that's the last Enjolras hears about any of it that night, because when they get back to Grantaire's place several hours later, Grantaire passes out almost immediately.

It's the last time for a long time that Enjolras sees him drunk, though, and he wonders if that means something.

*

Sometimes Enjolras thinks his friends think he's crazy, real crazy, the kind they send people to in-patient treatment centers for. He can picture them all exchanging worried glances behind his back, and when he tells his therapist about it, she purses her lips and says she'll call the psych who handles his prescriptions. That does little to quell his suspicions, and when he leaves therapy to see Grantaire waiting for him, big sunglasses, black hoodie with the hood up, dark figure in the blinding snow, cigarette hanging from his mouth, it's a relief.

Grantaire seems to feel the same, because he smiles when he sees Enjolras, big and kind of crooked, that gorgeous smile he does where his teeth aren't pressed together, cigarette tucked between them, gap of darkness, conical puff of smoke. The swooping sensation in Enjolras's stomach, rumble of anxiety momentarily dispelled in deference to this more powerful ruler, and Grantaire is saying, “Want to grab lunch?” 

Enjolras exhales. Steamed up breath. “Yeah,” he says, and Grantaire loops an arm through Enjolras's and steers them both toward St. Marks.

*

Things he knows: the Hudson River will be completely thawed by mid-April, and then it'll be even more fanciful to imagine escaping to New Jersey using only an old pair of ice skates.

“I have some you can borrow,” Feuilly says, shaking his hair out of his face in a gesture that reminds Enjolras of years ago, when they were all younger and thought they'd have saved the world by now.

“Thanks,” Enjolras says. He buries his fists deeper in his pockets and keeps walking. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“How do you stop yourself from caring about anything other than this?”

Feuilly pauses mid-step, turns to look up at Enjolras. “You don't.”

“But you've never strayed from the cause. It's all you do, all you think about, all you care about—and I used to be able to do that too, but lately …”

“I haven't needed to stray from it,” Feuilly says. He starts walking again, tightening his scarf as he does. “Everyone I care is part of it, inextricably.” A pause, then: “So is Grantaire.”

“Grantaire doesn't care about it.”

“It doesn't matter. If he cares about you, he cares about it.”

Enjolras looks out at the river, notes how much more of the dark middle parts he can see now. “I guess you're right.”

“And if he didn't,” Feuilly says gently, “sometimes it's healthy to stray.”

Enjolras whirls around to look at him so sharply his neck hurts. “You've never—”

“No. But like I said: everyone I care is part of it inextricably. I don't know what would happen if I met someone who wasn't.”

“You'd ignore it,” Enjolras says.

“I'm not the one famous for ignoring his feelings.”

Enjolras finds himself laughing. “Courfeyrac's an asshole.”

“Don't blame him. Sometimes Combeferre joins in.”

“Do you just have a running conversation about my sex life or …?”

“If I told, they'd kick me out.” Feuilly kicks at a pile of snow. “I need to get to work. You good here?”

“Yeah,” Enjolras says, waving him off. “Thanks for coming along.”

Feuilly nods, squeezes Enjolras goodbye, and disappears into a thicket of snow-covered trees.

Enjolras looks at the bike trail ahead of him, ignores the rumbling in his gut, and forges onward.

*

Sometimes Grantaire is absurdly difficult to reach, will go a weekend or longer without any contact at all before showing up outside of Enjolras's office at the end of the day and taking him to dinner or swooping into the Musain twenty minutes late for a meeting.

This is one of those weeks, when they haven't connected since they went to lunch after Enjolras's appointment with his therapist, and so Enjolras is ridiculously charmed to see him now, snow melting in his hair, a real coat on this time, smoking a cigarette and playing with his phone outside the Musain before a meeting.

“Eponine kicked me out,” Grantaire explains when he sees Enjolras, smiling widely and putting his cigarette out in a nearby ashtray, which, up until their acquaintance, was primarily filled with Bahorel and Courfeyrac's ashes. Enjolras can't help but be filled with unspeakable fondness, and he moves closer, presses a gloved hand to Grantaire's waist.

“That's unfortunate,” Enjolras says, kissing him hello.

“It's good to see you too,” Grantaire says. 

Enjolras doesn't move to separate. He can feel Grantaire's pulse, hummingbird-quick, against his lips when he unravels Grantaire's scarf to kiss Grantaire's neck, can feel his yearning, knows Grantaire wants this as badly as Enjolras does even before Grantaire's fingers curl themselves into Enjolras's hair.

“We're going to be late,” Grantaire says softly.

“They can start without me.”

“Can they?”

Enjolras steps back. Grantaire's fingers unwind and come to rest, briefly, on his cheek, smoothing a path down Enjolras's jaw and then brushing some hair out of his face.

“Go lead the people,” Grantaire says.

“Are you not coming?”

“I just want one more cigarette. I'll be quick.”

“Okay,” Enjolras says, and it feels strange, this new reluctance, but Grantaire squeezes Enjolras's wrist and winks before lighting another cigarette, and Enjolras leaves him there in the lightly-falling snow.

*

“What day do you want to do it?” Combeferre says.

They're at Enjolras's apartment again, finally ready to execute, flash drive full of all the information they'll need sitting in the middle of Enjolras's coffee table. It looks so simple, small and bright green, but Enjolras still feels like his table should break under the weight of it.

“Saturday?” Courfeyrac suggests.

“I have a date with Grantaire that evening,” Enjolras says, tearing his eyes away from the flash drive to meet Courfeyrac's. “I'll do it Sunday around noon.”

“Another one?” Combeferre says, and it shouldn't surprise Enjolras so much that he's smiling. “That's awesome, man.” 

“Things are going well?” Courfeyrac says.

“Yeah, they are,” Enjolras says. “Combeferre, can you be ready to check our email right after? I'm trashing the computer after I finish with it, so—”

When Enjolras looks up again, he sees Combeferre and Courfeyrac exchanging a series of significant glances.

“I hate it when you two do this,” he says. “Are we good?”

“We're good,” Courfeyrac says, but it's Combeferre who smiles widely enough to shake Enjolras's prickly exterior. “Are you good?”

Enjolras finds himself smiling despite himself. “Yeah,” he says. “I am.”

*

_hey i actually can't make it tomorrow tonight, something came up_

_everything ok?_

_yeah, we'll talk soon k?_

_wait what does soon mean? are you sure everything's ok?_

_Seen: 9:43 p.m._

*

Enjolras spends most of Saturday at home, mildly worried about Grantaire. A quick look at his iCloud shows that he's spending most of _his_ Saturday at home, too, though, which means he's probably just doing art stuff. Enjolras dismisses his anxiety as just that—anxiety—and forces himself to spend the day relaxing in preparation for a Sunday that he knows will have him looking over his shoulder for the entire long journey back to his apartment from downtown.

He uses his old laptop for actual Netflix for once, watches in silence, orders pizza, and imagines what it would be like to do this all the time. No railing against the government. No breaking into CIA computers. Just relaxing in his spare time, caring about when Pim and Jam hook up or whatever.

It's boring, he decides, and lets himself fall asleep.

*

Enjolras conducts his work in the Starbucks bathroom. He likes the one near NYU because its bathroom is roomier, complete with a handicap stall that he uses—with only minor ethical qualms—as his temporary workspace.

He's halfway done when someone knocks on the door to the stall.

“Occupied!” Enjolras calls.

There's a brief silence but no footsteps to indicate the person has left.

“I'm in here,” Enjolras says, and then there's a loud BANG that shakes the metal frame of the bathroom stalls as the door is kicked open.

“Enjolras,” Grantaire says. He looks strange, and it takes Enjolras a moment to figure out why: Grantaire's half-smile, usually a near-constant presence, is gone, replaced with a hard-faced stony look of which Enjolras had not known him capable. “Hi.”

“I—hi, Grantaire,” Enjolras says, closing his burner laptop and standing up. Below, the toilet paper he used to line the seat slips off the porcelain and falls into the toilet. 

“Are you taking a shit with your pants on?”

“No,” Enjolras says. “I mean—I hadn't. I hadn't taken them off yet. What are you doing here?”

“Enough with the bullshit, Enjolras.” Grantaire holds up a flash drive. “I have control of the exit nodes here. Everything you've been doing, I have access to.”

Enjolras goes cold all over, but it's not an anxious sort of cold, nor even the cold of dread; instead, he feels sort of hollow, carved out, a carcass left in the snow.

“You—you're a hacker?”

“No,” Grantaire says. “ _You're_ a hacker. Come with me.”

“No.”

“If you don't, I'm going to assume everyone in the ABC is at least an accessory to whatever crimes you've been committing and have them all charged.” He examines his fingernails, which are stained, as ever, with charcoal, a detail that gives Enjolras whiplash. “So. It's your choice.”

“You're asking me to go with you, or all my friends are—what? Charged with crimes they didn't commit?”

Grantaire stares at him for a moment, wide brown eyes not betraying a speck of emotion. 

“I am,” he says.

“And you expect me to just—just come with you?”

“I do.”

Enjolras stares back at him and then admits, begrudgingly, that Grantaire is right.

*

They take a car to Grantaire's apartment, the screen up to conceal the driver.

“Your place, R?”

It's a woman, her voice familiar, but Enjolras can't quite place it, not in this dull, slightly shocked state. 

“Yeah,” Grantaire says. “I'll leave the computer with you. Tell the others to wait for my call.”

Grantaire isn't looking at him, instead choosing to stare out the window as they barrel toward the Williamsburg bridge. It's tense and quiet in the back seat, Enjolras's laptop sitting between them. Enjolras can't remember the last time he was this close to Grantaire without touching him at least a little, fingers at his sleeve or knees bumping beneath a table. 

But now every line in Grantaire's body is tense, the stiffness in his shoulders clear. He's wearing sunglasses as usual, but this time they're menacing instead of charming. His elbow rests on the window, his fingernails between his teeth, and Enjolras sees the clear line of a gun half-concealed beneath Grantaire's hoodie. 

Grantaire seems to realize it at the same time that Enjolras sees it. “You can try to steal it, I guess,” he says. “There's no guarantee you'd even hit me, but at this range, I'd probably die. But again—this laptop has all the evidence we need to convict _someone_ , and plenty of people have observed you leading those meetings at the ABC. It wouldn't be hard to put two and two together.”

“You're blackmailing me,” Enjolras says. “You're blackmailing me and you have a gun.”

Grantaire looks at him at last. “Yeah,” he says. “No shit, Enjolras.”

It sounds so much like him that Enjolras wants to scream. This can't be real—someone is forcing Grantaire to do this. Grantaire loves him. He loves Grantaire. This can't be real.

“Who are you?” Enjolras says.

“You know who I am,” Grantaire says. “It isn't my fault you didn't pay enough attention.”

Then he turns back, and is silent until they arrive at his apartment.

*

It's dark in the room Grantaire leads him to, a room Enjolras has always assumed to be a closet. Grantaire, apparently equipped with the ability to see in the dark even with his sunglasses on, steers Enjolras to what feels like a cot and sits him down before stepping away.

“Grantaire, what is this?” he says, starting to feel a little panicky. “What are you doing?”

“Relax,” Grantaire says, voice close enough that Enjolras feels warm breath on his face and reaches out blindly until his hand lands on what must be Grantaire's chest. Grantaire jumps like he's not expecting it.

“Grantaire, what's going on?” Enjolras says. 

Things he knows: Grantaire has a gun, and Grantaire is blackmailing him. Enjolras is absolutely guilty of at least a dozen crimes, and so are Courfeyrac and Combeferre and Feuilly and several of the rest of the Amis. Grantaire loves him. Grantaire would not betray him.

Which means: Grantaire is in trouble, or: this isn't real, or: he's wrong about Grantaire.

“Don't touch me,” Grantaire says, voice so cold that Enjolras swears his blood freezes right there. Shapes start to appear in the darkness, Grantaire's form a little farther away than it was moments ago. There's the flicker of a lighter, a cigarette in Grantaire's mouth, and—it can't be safe, Enjolras thinks irrationally, to hold a gun that close to one's own face while lighting a cigarette. 

“What's going on?” Enjolras asks again, and then Grantaire turns the light on, casting the room in the same shitty fluorescent glow that comes standard in the rest of Grantaire's apartment, nearly burned out, flickering, dim. “Are you okay? Is someone forcing you to do this?”

In fact, it's absurd just how _much_ this room is part of Grantaire's apartment. There's a chair a few feet away that matches Grantaire's furniture, the carpet is the same as the carpet in Grantaire's bedroom, the blanket beneath Enjolras on the cot is definitely from Grantaire's own bed set. 

It starts to click: the giant apartment on an artist's paycheck. The clean Facebook page, the precise PayPal transactions. LiberTea's lightning fast WiFi. The dull thump of Enjolras's own heartbeat, forcibly repressed. 

“Someone is _paying_ you to do this,” Enjolras says. “You're not an artist. You're a hacker.”

“That's your problem,” Grantaire says. He sits down in the chair, leaning back so casually it looks practiced, one hand holding a gun, the other resting delicately on the arm of the chair. Sunglasses shoved up on his head like a tourist at the Statue of Liberty. Like everything else with Grantaire: deliberate casualness, forced perfection, the odd sheen of unreality. No wonder Enjolras fell for it. “You're so fucking close-minded. Computer engineering and art are not mutually exclusive things.”

He points the gun at Enjolras's head. You don't need to be a perfect shot at this range, but Grantaire has the easy one-handed confidence of someone who is. For some reason, that doesn't make Enjolras's anxiety kick in. Things he knows: Grantaire loves him. Things he knows: people don't kill the people they love.

“Now,” Grantaire says. “Tell me who you work for.”

“What?”

“Who do you work for?”

“I don't work for anyone,” Enjolras says blankly.

“That's not true,” Grantaire says. “Don't tell me you came up with that catastrophically stupid plan all on your own.” 

He gets up again, close enough to touch. Still, his eyes are ice cold in a way Enjolras hasn't seen before. Grantaire pushes his gun into Enjolras's chest and leans closer, and suddenly the reality of this situation—Grantaire, either angry or a paid thug desperate for money, is threatening to kill him. No one knows he's here. He's been dispossessed of his phone and the laptop containing a good deal of damning evidence. There are no windows in this room. 

“You're so special, Apollo,” Grantaire says. “You're gorgeous, brilliant—you're just so close-minded.”

He sounds disappointed, and despite himself, Enjolras feels almost ashamed. That's what makes it happen, the rise of anxiety rumbling through his belly, the sudden _need_ for Xanax.

“But Combeferre's good. Or you are. I don't know.” Grantaire's voice goes cold again. 

“Grantaire, what are you doing?” Enjolras says. He reaches up, wraps his hand around Grantaire's wrist, and somehow, somehow, that doesn't scare Grantaire into pulling the trigger. But it's hard to breathe now, like the walls of this room are suddenly much closer than he thought they were moments ago, like Grantaire is sucking all the air out for the sake of Enjolras's personal torture. “Just—just let go, we'll go back to my place, have breakfast—or dinner or whatever—this'll all be fine.”

“Shut up,” Grantaire says. “Shut up. Don't tell me this was all your plan.” He twists his wrist away from Enjolras, pulls the gun from Enjolras's chest and pushes it between Enjolras's teeth. “Please tell me someone fucking blackmailed you.”

Enjolras stares at him in silence.

“Enjolras,” Grantaire says, and then it hits Enjolras that what they were going to do, the destruction of it, the revolution, isn't going to happen. And Grantaire is happy about that. Enjolras blinks up at him. Grantaire's eyes are suddenly crystal clear, wide and cold and—wet. “Talk now. Talk or I swear to god I'll shoot.”

*

“Did you know I kept a diary,” Grantaire says eventually. He's relaxed his grip on his gun now, but it's still angled at Enjolras. “Written, of course, and shoved through a couple of different codes to make it harder to read for anyone who found it. It looked normal enough to someone like you—meaningless transactions, notes about the new exhibit at the Met. I burned it yesterday.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Do you know what I called it?”

“I don't care.”

“It was called the Gospel According to Judas.” There's a pause, and Grantaire leans back, looks up at the ceiling. It's the first time he's looked away from Enjolras in what feels like hours. “Did you know Judas was the only one who really got Christ, according to the gospel from his perspective? Christ asked him to betray him. It set everything in motion. It was always—God's plan.”

“Are you telling me this is going to be good for me?”

“I mean, if I killed you, you'd be a martyr,” Grantaire says. “If I turned you in, you'd be a warning.”

“Politics or friendship,” Enjolras says. “This is what you meant.”

Grantaire looks down at him, the faintest trace of surprise on his face. “What?”

“You knew I'd choose to protect them. Because of that question.”

“That was unrelated to this,” Grantaire says. He backs away a little, just enough to light another cigarette.

“Bullshit,” Enjolras says.

Grantaire doesn't look at him.

“Arrest me,” Enjolras says. “I could break out of jail.”

“No, you couldn't,” Grantaire says, snorting. “Look at you. I bet you can't even do a push-up.”

“I could hack my way out.”

“What, like no one's ever tried that before? You think you'd be the only smart person in jail?”

“Fuck you,” Enjolras says. 

“You did, I guess,” Grantaire says, and then something hits Enjolras: _If I turned you in._

Grantaire seems to notice it at the same time, though, because he shakes his head: “You're right that I haven't told my higher-ups. You can try to kill me if you want to, but it probably wouldn't work. I'm stronger than you and I have a gun. The person who drove us here knows you're here, knows what's on the laptop, and knows that I'm—that we know each other. Biblically, I mean.” He laughs a little at his joke, but Enjolras is processing: if Grantaire brought up their relationship, that means Grantaire views it as a weakness. An accident, then? Not a deliberate manipulation? Hope hammers away inside Enjolras's chest despite itself. “And even if you succeed, I have all the information you transferred over LiberTea's network in a compressed file ready to send to my commanding officer. Email goes out if I don't personally stop it. That includes the encryption key you didn't bother getting rid of.” He half-frowns at Enjolras. “I'm sure you know that if anything happens to Joly, Bossuet, Musichetta, LiberTea, or anyone else, this all goes out.” 

Things Enjolras knows: Grantaire loves him. Grantaire loves Joly, Bossuet, and Musichetta. Grantaire knew them before all of this, and maybe they knew about this, too.

“So why haven't you done anything about this yet?” 

“I'm trying to decide if you'd be better off dead or in military jail,” Grantaire says. “And I'm trying to decide which one I could actually live with.”

That's an uncomfortable topic, Enjolras decides, so he changes it: “How do you even know anything at all?”

“If you control the internet at LiberTea, you control the exit nodes. If you control the exit nodes—”

“You control the traffic.”

“Right.”

“Are Joly and Bossuet in on it?”

“Does it matter?”

Enjolras considers it. “No.”

Grantaire stares at him. There's something in his eyes now, a spark, almost a twinkle. 

“When Courtney Love was twenty-nine, everyone decided she'd killed the person she loved.”

“Is that relevant?”

“No,” Grantaire says, looking away. “It's not.”

*

“I need my meds,” Enjolras says, after a little more limbo. “Can you let me go home and get them? Or get them for me? Or—I don't know, maybe you have alternatives?” Can weed make up for Xanax? Enjolras isn't sure.

“I have them,” Grantaire says. “Or, not yours exactly—I forged some scripts.” He hands Enjolras a few bottles, but the lighting's not good enough for Enjolras to read them. “Am I missing anything?”

Enjolras stares at him. “You thought of everything.”

“I didn't want you to—” Grantaire sighs. “I know that's, like, a breach of trust, figuring out your prescriptions and getting you fake ones. But I didn't want you to be—I don't know what you're like off them. I was worried about you.”

“Worried,” Enjolras says numbly. “A breach of— _Jesus_ , Grantaire, what the _fuck_ —”

“Look, Enjolras, just tell me what I want to hear and we can end all this.”

For some reason, that's what does it. Enjolras sits up rapidly, his heart pounding.

“What the fuck, Grantaire.”

“Enjolras—”

He can't breathe suddenly, like all the air's gone, which makes sense because there aren't any windows in this room and it's probably soundproofed and who knows what soundproofing does to the air permeability of a room certainly not Enjolras it's just not his brand of engineering—and his heart is ricocheting against his ribcage, definitely not in the right place, and is he having a heart attack? 

He's having a heart attack. 

He's definitely having a heart attack. 

That pain in his left arm—is that soreness from the position he's been in, or is it a heart attack? But his head hurts too—do aneurysms hurt? Fuck he's going to die, he's going to die right here in this room with this person who Enjolras thought loved him and he's not sure he can even hold on to that belief anymore not if he was just some—what? Tool? Grantaire seems like he has bigger fish to fry but what if he just doesn't know Enjolras is actually a bigger fish than he thinks that the Amis are actually the entire school of fish that there's no one else anywhere near them that they're a solitary school floating in the ocean trying to fight the fucking sharks but is Grantaire even a shark? How can he be a goddamn shark he's Grantaire he loves him or does he? Does Enjolras love him does—

“Enjolras.”

“This whole thing has been fake,” Enjolras gasps. “You—you—”

“No—Enjolras, no—”

“You started this to get close to me and spy on us and you—you're going to kill me—”

“Enjolras—”

“I'm going to die here and no one's ever going to know are they—you'll cover it up—what's your real name?”

“My name is Grantaire. Enjolras—”

But Enjolras isn't listening anymore, can't breathe, a dull ache in his fist makes him realize he's beating the wall with it, it takes him a second to notice his eyes are squeezed shut, and then there's the heavy weight of another body next to him on the bed, a tentative hand on his shoulder—“ _Don't touch me!_ ”—Grantaire moves immediately, completely backs off, and when Enjolras opens his eyes again (throat, fist, head all sore—breathing ragged), Grantaire is on the opposite side of the room, gun in his hand pointing at the floor.

“I wanted to give you a Xanax,” Grantaire says. “In the bag—do you think a brighter light is too much stimulation?”

“Yes,” Enjolras says, hating himself for it. “I can figure it out.”

He does, feeling for the right pill, swallowing it without water.

“Enjolras, I didn't—my intention wasn't for us to get close. I was just supposed—you being _you_ was never part of the plan. I was just supposed to go to meetings, get some information. Make sure you weren't too much of a threat.”

“Except I was.”

“I don't know,” Grantaire says desperately. “You won't talk to me.”

“Why the fuck _should_ I?” 

Grantaire sits back down in his chair. 

“Because if you don't,” Grantaire says, and his voice takes on that cold calm from earlier again—the transition between the two gives Enjolras whiplash, it really does, and he forces himself not to give in to the blackness at the edges of his vision, to breathe, it'll take the Xanax a while to kick in but the knowledge that this is going to end soon—the panic if not his imprisonment—calms him down anyway, “if you don't, then you and Combeferre and Courfeyrac and Feuilly are going to jail. Probably also the rest of the Amis.”

“What about the bartenders?”

“What?”

“At the Musain. You're not going to threaten me with them, too?”

“Musichetta and Eponine?” Grantaire raises his eyebrow. “No.”

“Why?”

“Why do you keep expecting me to answer your questions when you won't answer mine?”

“I'm working alone, and I'm not working for anyone,” Enjolras says. “I—went rogue.”

“Enjolras, come _on_ ,” Grantaire says. “You know you're not going to be any good at lying to me, so why _are_ you?”

“You're not going to kill me,” Enjolras says.

Things he knows: 

“No,” Grantaire agrees. He doesn't look happy about it.

Grantaire loves him.

*

“Are you hungry?”

They've been sat in silence for nearly an hour, Grantaire confident enough in either his assessment of Enjolras's strength or his encryption skills that he's moved his chair closer to Enjolras's cot and is actually texting, rapid fingers, pausing to wait for a response, texting again.

“No,” Enjolras says.

“I'm not going to torture you or anything,” Grantaire says. “I'm just telling you: if you don't tell me what I want to know, you're going to jail, and not just any jail, but the jail potential terrorists go to.”

Enjolras snorts. “Are you threatening me with Guantanamo Bay?”

“Of course not,” Grantaire says. “You're a white American with wealthy parents. I'm not stupid.” He lights a cigarette. “I'm threatening you with plain old jail and a trial for treason with at least five willing witnesses and several gigabytes of evidence.”

At least five. Enjolras counts: Joly, Bossuet, Grantaire—who else? The driver? Musichetta, the new bartender? Someone already participating in their organization? Another spy? Another—

Enjolras racks his mind: it can't be Combeferre, Courfeyrac, or Feuilly. He's known them for too long, knows they believe too strongly. Jehan is a poet and harmless—but it's that sort of thinking that got him into this mess in the first place. Eponine? She hardly ever pays attention to meetings now that she doesn't moon over Marius anymore. Maybe it's Marius, Courfeyrac's roommate, no reasons at all to care about the cause—

“It's going to drive you crazy, not knowing who the five are, isn't it?” Grantaire says. He exhales. The room, blocked off as it is, has become very smoky very quickly. 

Enjolras notices an easel facing the wall in one corner, shelves stocked with paint bottles beside it. For some reason, this detail breaks through the coldness, and Enjolras doesn't believe any of it.

“I don't believe you.”

“I guess you don't have to,” Grantaire says. “Here's the deal, Enjolras: You have five minutes to tell me who you're working for and what your plan is. If at the end of five minutes you haven't started talking, I'm through with this, and you, Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Feuilly—at minimum—are going to be arrested.”

“I thought you knew what we were doing.”

Grantaire looks triumphant, and Enjolras realizes a moment later that he's misspoken: _we_.

“That was a royal 'we', I'm assuming,” Grantaire says. “So. Have anything else to say?”

“Fine,” Enjolras says. “We were going to blackmail the American government in order to force them to release data about government surveillance to the American public. If they didn't do it on their own, we were going to release it ourselves, along with damaging information about the relationship between the Iranian government and the French government and the American government.”

“So if they didn't listen to you,” Grantaire says, “you were going to start a war.”

Enjolras stares back at him, defiant. 

“Are you actually as stupid as that plan sounds?” Grantaire says. “I mean, tell me you didn't really think that would be a good idea. Were you bluffing?”

“No.”

“So you actually would've started World War III.”

“It wouldn't have been—”

“You majored in Political Science, didn't you?” Grantaire says. “At _Columbia_?”

“Yes,” Enjolras says. “Which is why it would've worked. It would've been—like a game of chicken.”

“Except in this game of chicken, you're risking the existence of the planet for the sake of government transparency,” Grantaire says.

“They would've agreed.”

“This is the American government we're talking about,” Grantaire says. “They would've _agreed_? What if it got out that they agreed? Can you imagine the slippery slope that would've created?”

“We considered it and deemed it worthwhile.”

“You thought this would give you—what? A bargaining chip? Over who? The NSA? Is that supposed to change the world or something?” Grantaire shakes his head. “I'll tell you what would've happened. There are two possibilities: one, they listen to you, cooperate, then throw you in jail at the first possible moment and lock down the Internet. It becomes impossible to even access the onion network. People who work in infosec are ruthlessly watched, forever. You know the Patriot Act? Like the Patriot Act, if 9/11 had been an act of cyberterrorism conducted by Americans against their own government.”

“Two, they listen, cooperate—”

“And what? Everything is lovely afterward?” Grantaire lights another cigarette, offers the pack to Enjolras, who—despite himself—accepts. Grantaire lights it for him, too, leaning over from his chair. His fingers are close enough to touch—Enjolras thinks if he reaches up, he can maybe get the lighter, set the room on fire or something—but Grantaire has his gun in his other hand, and anyway has data ready to be sent off to fuck knows where or whom. 

“And the American people vote them out of government and choose leaders who respect their privacy and care about bettering foreign relations, not proving themselves the biggest bullies in the sandbox.”

“Are you really that naive?” Grantaire asks. “I mean, I knew you were an idealist, but I never until right now thought you actually—I mean, really?”

Enjolras forces himself not to choke on the cigarette smoke, which creates a rough, scratching feeling in his throat.

“Two,” Grantaire says. “They call your bluff, except you're not bluffing. Now Iran is very upset with the American and French governments. It's unstable. Its military can't reach France or the U.S.—but close by are American troops stationed in Iraq, and just a little further than that, Israel.”

“Attacking Israel—”

“—would be grounds for war with the U.S., whatever your views on BDS,” Grantaire says. “And the U.S. has been waiting for an excuse to bomb Iran off the planet since 1979. Except that the U.S. might not even have to get their hands dirty. Israel has nuclear weapons. So from here, we have two possibilities: either Israel destroys Iran, wiping out nearly eighty million people, most of whom are civilians—or the U.S. intervenes, sparking a war with Iran's biggest allies—”

“—Russia and China,” Enjolras says, going cold. 

“That's your game of chicken,” Grantaire says. “You're no longer part of it now. It's one giant Cold War, fought out in proxies across the Middle East and East Asia. Again.”

“We considered that it could be a possibility,” Enjolras says. “But—”

“As someone who works for the American government,” Grantaire says, “let me tell you. That is not only a possibility. Did Edward Snowden spark a revolution? Or Julian Assange? Or did they just spark debates about transparency and heroism and national security?”

“Ours would've been different,” Enjolras says. “Because of the—”

“You are not this naive,” Grantaire repeats. “Tell me: did you think the destruction would be worth it if it started a revolution?”

“Did I think eighty million Iranian lives were worth an America with a more transparent government?” Enjolras says. “Really?”

Grantaire glares back at him. “It's the sacrifice you were making.”

“I was sure they'd cooperate,” Enjolras says. “Even if we went to jail, it would have been worth it. The end of super PACs, a new need for truth and transparency from the government, it would peel back the layers hiding systemic racism and secret imperialism—”

“Or it would be ignored.” 

Enjolras stares at him. The imagine of Edward Snowden hiding beneath a blanket in his hotel room in Russia comes to him, unbidden, and he clenches his fist, forgetting the cigarette is still in it. It burns his hand. 

“Or it would be ignored,” he says. 

Grantaire does not look victorious. He only looks sad. 

“Don't do it, Enjolras,” he says. 

“How can I? You took my laptop, and the chances of me leaving this place seem slim, so—”

“Have I convinced you?”

“What?”

“Have I convinced you that this is probably the stupidest plan you could've come up with?”

Enjolras stares at him. 

“I—” Grantaire says, and then puts down his gun, sighing. “You love me.”

Begrudgingly: “Yes.”

“That wouldn't have been enough to stop you.”

“No.”

“It's enough to stop me.” He stands up. “I thought we'd be here a lot longer. I—if I didn't know you, I probably would've—I don't know.” He racks a hand through his hair, looks down at Enjolras. A few feet away, the gun on Grantaire's chair gleams forebodingly.

“Are you just going to let me go?” Enjolras says.

“I—” Grantaire says, and then seems to make a decision. “You can't ever do this again. Next time, I won't be able to—protect you. At all. I'm going to be taken off this case by the end of the week, and if you get caught again, you're not going to—all I'm saying is, you need to consider the _actual_ consequences before you do something. Vigilante justice is one thing—catching sexual predators, outing corrupt small-time politicians, fine, do it, whatever. But when you start prying into the federal government's spy agencies, they notice.”

“What are you going to tell them?”

“That you're an enthusiast. You work in infosec and you wanted to test your skills. Your talk of revolution is—it's just that. Talk. You believe in peaceful protest and boycotts.”

Enjolras stares at him. 

“What about the rest of the Amis?”

“They'll have to stop, too. You might get hit with some small charges, but they'll just be fines. They'll make you more employable in your field, if anything.” Grantaire opens the door, and light comes flooding in, surprising Enjolras, who had forgotten the time of day. “I'm keeping the laptop. Musichetta already wiped your phone.”

“Musichetta—”

“I figure you should know,” Grantaire says. “You're being spied on. You have been for three years. They just didn't think it was bad enough to bring me in until recently.”

“So staying anonymous throughout the negotiation—”

“—would've been impossible, right.” 

Enjolras feels the bitter disappointment fill him from the bottom up until he feels like he's choking on it. “You're letting me go?”

Grantaire looks back at him, silent.

“Were you always going to let me go?”

Another breath of silence, then: “No. I thought I could—I didn't mean to get involved with you, not like this. I wish—” Grantaire looks away, mouth twisting. “When we got here, I fully intended to arrest you.”

“But you haven't. And you aren't going to.”

“Here are my requirements,” Grantaire says. “The next time you want to do something on this scale, you call me. The next time you think someone's watching you, call me. The next time you consider the consequences of your actions and decide prison is a worthy exchange, call me. And then listen to me when I tell you it's a bad idea.”

“ _You_ were the one who told me to think bigger.”

“I didn't mean _World War III_ bigger, Ap—asshole. I told you to go above board, that it'd be more effective, that it'd be _safer_ that way. I meant it.”

Enjolras catches the slip even if Grantaire thinks he doesn't. “What if it's not me? What if it's—”

Grantaire ignores him. “That goes for all the Amis.”

“I'm not going to spy on my friends.”

“I'm not asking you to spy on them. I'm asking you to protect them.”

“Politics or friendship,” Enjolras says.

“Exactly.” Grantaire leaves the room momentarily, coming back with something in his hand.

“Which would you choose?” Enjolras asks, tilting his head up. In this light, from this angle, Grantaire looks exhausted, worn, almost defeated. 

“Do you really have to ask?” Grantaire says. He hands Enjolras his phone. “Do you agree to my terms?”

“Yes.”

“Then you're free to go.”

Enjolras stares at him.

“I—” 

“Combeferre and Courfeyrac are still meeting you for dinner,” Grantaire says. “Go. Tell them you're not doing it. Tell them about the potential outcome of their actions—they're not stupid, they'll understand.”

“Can I tell them about you?”

“Are you asking my permission?”

“Well—I am locked in your apartment.”

Grantaire actually smiles, small and sad. Terrible, blank eyes. “Tell them whatever you want. Courfeyrac doesn't like me anyway.”

“If more people find out—what'll happen to you?”

Grantaire's smile goes from sad to sharp, bitter. “Use your imagination,” he says. “Goodbye, Apollo.”

Enjolras doesn't need to be told again. He pulls his coat on and leaves.

*

Courfeyrac and Combeferre are surprisingly easy to convince, the scenarios Grantaire proposed persuasive enough to shut both of them up. Neither of them seems particularly shocked by Grantaire's treachery, though they are startled to hear that he's at least as good with computers as Enjolras and Combeferre are, not to mention disturbed that Enjolras wants them to keep it to themselves.

“You're protecting him,” Combeferre says. “Why?”

“Because he loves him,” Courfeyrac says, and it's a testament to his love for Enjolras that he does not roll his eyes.

“Because he could've ratted all of us out, and he didn't,” Enjolras says. “That was his _job_ , and he didn't do it, and he might get fired—or arrested, if people find out—or worse—”

Enjolras is a hard rod of tension and has been for hours, every limb in his body stiff, his insides turned to metal. He feels inhuman, feels remade, cast in iron instead of flesh and bone, and Courfeyrac and Combeferre are staring at him like he has just done something deeply disturbing.

The irony of it all becomes too much for Enjolras to bear. All those months of his therapist congratulating him for not being so paranoid, all those times Courfeyrac asked if he was sure he was taking his meds, Combeferre telling him there's no way they can bar people from entry to the Musain, that they can't background check bartenders, all those ignored footsteps behind him, forcing himself not to break into Grantaire's Wi-Fi network, not even to ask him for the password because the temptation would have been too great—and to think, if only he'd trusted the paranoia instead of everyone around him for once, none of this would have happened. 

He starts to laugh. There is no humor in it; he can't even feel his lips curving upward. It's just the dry sound of someone who has had much too long a day finally, finally expelling pent-up hysteria.

Combeferre and Courfeyrac are still staring at him.

“Enjolras,” Combeferre says warily. “Are you alright?”

“Yes,” Enjolras says through the hysteria. “Yes, I'm fucking fine.”

“Do you want a Xanax?”

“I've already had two today,” Enjolras says, but he can't tamp down the hiccuping peals of laughter that escape from his mouth every time he opens it. If this is an anxiety attack, he's never had one like it. He thinks he prefers the feeling of oncoming death to this, this desperate sound, that look Combeferre and Courfeyrac are giving him like he's completely deranged.

Finally, after too long, the laughter stops. Enjolras's mouth twists, and he looks away from both their faces, glaring at his living room window, at the drawn shades and heavy curtains. He's on the sixth floor of his building, but, he thinks with fierce bitterness, one can never be too safe.

“It's a good thing you never let him over here,” Combeferre says, following his gaze, and Enjolras wants to break something.

“I'll just have Courfeyrac make all of my decisions for me in the future,” Enjolras says, standing up.

Combeferre and Courfeyrac take the hint: batteries go back into phones, and Courfeyrac hugs him goodbye, and Enjolras, alone for the first time in what seems like days, exhausted and drained and feeling terribly emotionally hollow, doesn't know what to do with himself.

There's beer left from the six pack Courfeyrac brought with him, and he's all anxiety med-ed out for the day, so Enjolras opens a bottle and gets on his computer. Combeferre checked Grantaire's records, ensured they were squeaky clean, but there have to be things they missed—suspicious transactions, large paychecks in his bank account that might help Enjolras figure out who his employers are, emails from coworkers.

He knows it might be smarter to check Joly, Bossuet, and Musichetta first, but Enjolras can't be fucked, is chiefly and completely concerned only with Grantaire. 

There's another Ami who might have betrayed them, who knew all of this as it was happening, but Enjolras can't think who it might have been. There has to be a clue somewhere—an errant email, a text—

But there's nothing. Grantaire is as clean as Combeferre determined him to be. Even the texts he sends from his phone, the ones Enjolras can decrypt in less than a thousand years, even those are sterile: plans to get drinks with Bossuet and Joly, a link to a video for Jehan, questions about hardware to Feuilly that are just curious enough to not be suspicious, emojis traded back and forth with Eponine, pictures of cats, pictures of art, pictures of people, dozens—hundreds—of texts to Enjolras. 

He looks for Grantaire in government records, finds nothing. Schools—he shows up as having attended the schools he claims to have attended. Grades are there. Transcripts. Everything. 

Enjolras can picture a younger Grantaire at NYU, carrying art supplies—or just his laptop—from building to building, that gorgeous library, art studios in the city, figure drawing—he wonders if the charcoal ever washes off Grantaire's fingers or if they're just permanently stained now—

Enjolras has never been violent. He's not the right body type for it, he thinks, and anyway, there's something of toxic masculinity about it, about hitting things to make yourself feel better. But the idea of Grantaire's charcoal-covered fingers irritates him so much that he rises, walks calmly over to his coffee table, lifts one of the empty beer bottles, walks to the other side of the room, and in one controlled gesture, slams it against the wall.

Enjolras has never been someone who experiences his emotions physically. Combeferre does, which is why opiates have such a hold over him, but Enjolras is a creature who rides almost entirely on intellect. So smashing the bottle doesn't make him feel better, exactly, but it does help relieve some of the hard-wound tension threatening to overcome him, and he sweeps up the mess quickly—sticky, sharp shards almost tempting, like if he pricks maybe he can just release some of this fucking tension, but then he'd really need to go see his therapist, so instead Enjolras throws them all into his trash can and returns to his computer.

Enjolras leans back in his chair and sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. His search has shown nothing of interest, only things he already knew or thought he knew about Grantaire, and records for the man known as Grantaire go back to the year he was born, which means it's either his real name or at this point close enough—but then something catches his eye: Grantaire was one year older than he should've been, twenty-three instead of twenty-two at his college graduation. There are a thousand reasons that could be the case, time off or an early birthday or a late start or failing classes—but Enjolras digs anyway. One year between high school and college, during which—

Grantaire was Army. Special Forces. There he is in fatigues. There he is holding an automatic weapon. Enjolras wonders, and then scolds himself for wondering, if Grantaire ever killed anyone who recognized him as an Arab, spoke to him in Arabic, begged him to stop.

—Grantaire loves the Chrysler Building, loves it from its spires to its foundation, loves it both because and in spite of its shorter stature—

“Focus,” Enjolras says aloud, sipping some of Courfeyrac's beer. It's bitter in the back of his throat and he doesn't like beer much and he doesn't like drinking much, but it's cold and sort of sweet and forces him to remember that he has a body and washes the leftover taste of cigarettes from his mouth, which is enough.

Usually people enlist for five years, Enjolras discovers on Wikipedia, which means Grantaire finished while at NYU. Unless he was discharged, but his records don't say anything about that. 

—they don't say anything, either, about the way he talks, like everything out of his mouth is a joke even when he's deadly serious, and they don't mention his smile, the way the apples of his cheeks curve up to meet his sunglasses, the Tower of Babel—

But who does he work for now? Still Army? Almost definitely not, Enjolras decides; Grantaire reeks of someone who can't handle that kind of mentality. If he did re-enlist, he probably wouldn't be within American borders.

But Enjolras isn't supposed to be looking at NSA and CIA records. He's not sure either agency even has the authority to send Grantaire out on a task like this. He glances at the clock, realizes it's well past midnight, remembers that he has work in eight hours, turns off his computer, takes his meds, and goes to bed.

Suitably drugged up for it, Enjolras sinks into a fitful sleep, and when he wakes up, it's to surprising sunlight streaming in through his window and one missed call from Grantaire.

*

It takes a month for Enjolras to sleep through the night again, and it doesn't help that he can't be completely honest with his therapist for fear of discovery of both what he's done and what Grantaire has done. He delivers some absurd fabrication about Grantaire being a liar with a false persona, which is partially true but sounds fake enough to make his therapist frown, crease appearing deep in one cheek.

“I know it doesn't make sense,” Enjolras says. “But can you just trust that I can't tell you a lot more than that?”

“Are you in danger?” she asks, in that same cool, disconnected voice she uses for everything.

“No,” Enjolras says. “It's just—private.”

“Okay,” she says. “Let's move on, then. What we need to figure out is how you're going to learn to trust again.”

“I can still trust,” Enjolras says, annoyed. They've been over this before. “It's not—I mean, he turned out to not be what I thought he was, but—my friends have stood by me, they've been incredible, and I'd trust them all with my life.”

But she shakes her head. Still cool, still collected, she leans back in her chair. He half-expects her to steeple her fingers, but instead she takes a sip from her lipstick-stained coffee mug. It's the only part of her exterior that doesn't seem almost inhumanly frosty (one of the traits that drew Enjolras to her in the first place, the other being—and he's ashamed to think this now, knowing what Grantaire would say and hating that he still cares about it—her education, a bachelor of science from Penn, Ph. D/M.D. from Harvard, an absurd background that Enjolras figured meant she'd understand his workaholic tendencies, his necessity for clinical perfection—and she does), and so it's the only part of her exterior that Enjolras can interpret to mean something. She sips coffee, he's noticed, before she's about to tell him something she thinks is profound about himself. Sometimes she's right.

“It's not about trusting people,” she says. “That's never been your issue. You trust people. You trust that society will want to change. You see the good in the world.”

“What, then?” Enjolras says.

“It's about trusting yourself, Enjolras,” she says, and Enjolras blinks. 

“Right,” he says. “Right.”

*

Days pass. Weeks pass.

The snow melts. The Hudson defrosts. 

Enjolras is alone.

He didn't realize, the whole time they were together, how much of his emotional and mental real estate Grantaire started to take up. It should be relieving, not having to worry about him, not having to think about him at all—it should give Enjolras more time and energy to focus on the cause, to figure out slightly less apocalyptic routes to liberation. But instead he just spends more time thinking about Grantaire, and it's not even productive thought, completely circular, stressful enough that Enjolras lies awake at night wondering—how much of it was real? Is Grantaire really an artist? Did he really use to be a bouncer? What about the opium? Was that real, or was it just a way to get closer to Enjolras? Why did he need to get so close to Enjolras? Was it real? Did he love him? Does he love him?

“You're not going to figure any of this out unless you talk to him.”

Courfeyrac, voice lowered, back of the Musain—they've reset, sort of, returned to only working there because it's the only place they can trust, and Musichetta is gone so Enjolras feels marginally safer.

“I've been thinking the same thing lately,” Enjolras says.

“Really?” Combeferre says. “Then maybe you should—”

“I know,” Enjolras says. “I know, I just don't want to—what if I fuck up again, and we all end up in danger, or—” He pauses, takes a drink of water. “But if he'd wanted to, he would've already arrested me.”

“And he didn't,” Combeferre says. “There has to be a reason for that, right?”

Right.

*

_come over._

Grantaire has never been to Enjolras's apartment, hasn't even been told his address, but Grantaire knows where Enjolras lives. Of this, Enjolras is absolutely positive.

And he's right: it takes Grantaire over an hour to get from Bushwick to Harlem, but when he does, he looks just like himself, black hoodie beneath a military-style jacket, sunglasses, cigarette dangling from his mouth unlit like he's waiting for permission. Which, Enjolras supposes, he is. 

“Go ahead,” Enjolras says, nodding at it. 

He used to hate the smell of cigarette smoke, or at least to not like it, to find it suffocating and acrid and frankly rude, but somehow in the last few months he's had his mind changed. 

Grantaire lights his cigarette, watching Enjolras warily. The scent of it triggers something in Enjolras, and he moves away from the door, realizing too late that this was a mistake, that being in a confined space with Grantaire now feels categorically different, almost wrong. 

“Do you want to go for a walk?” Grantaire says.

Enjolras hates him for it, but Grantaire gets him in a way no one else does. He shrugs on his coat and follows Grantaire out of his apartment and down the stairs. 

Enjolras's building is on 125th and Riverside, so they go to the park, walking a respectable length away from each other. It feels at once too close and too distant for Enjolras, unnatural, wrong, but Grantaire doesn't seem bothered by it.

“I've always liked Harlem,” Grantaire says, looking out at the Hudson River. “Your apartment's nice.”

“Thanks.” Enjolras looks over at him and thinks, bizarrely, that he looks different. But they've only been apart two months, and Grantaire has always had this stubble, that hair, errant curl falling over his face. “Can I have a cigarette?”

Grantaire looks at him, startled. “Uh—yeah. Of course.”

He hands one to Enjolras, watches as Enjolras lights it. There's a little uptick of one corner of Grantaire's mouth as Enjolras coughs. 

“So you haven't picked up smoking?” Grantaire asks. 

“Fuck off,” Enjolras mumbles—

—and feels it as the tension between them, having momentarily dropped away, now returns, leaving Grantaire's mouth twisting as he looks away, and that's unnatural too.

“Do you ever not wear your sunglasses?”

“I have sensitive eyes.”

“Take them off.”

Grantaire obliges, tucking them into the collar of his shirt, revealing collarbone a shade lighter than his face. Enjolras looks for a moment too long, but Grantaire doesn't say anything about it, his mouth twisting further.

“Are we going to talk?” he asks. “Or are we just going to—” He waves a hand in the air in front of him. “If you don't think you can trust me again, there's no point to this.”

“First you need to apologize.”

“I'm sorry I misled you.”

“The rest.”

“I'm not apologizing for stopping you from getting yourself tried for treason,” Grantaire says. 

“You sound like you're in like—Game of Thrones or something. Treason.”

“It's a real thing that you really did,” Grantaire says. He stops walking, turns to face Enjolras. “I would've followed you to the ends of the earth, but you decided that in order to save the world, you'd have to ruin it first. You think you're revolutionaries, but you're just criminals, and you didn't think it through and that could've cost countless people their lives.” Grantaire shakes his head. “I'm not apologizing for that.”

“Fine. Then promise me something.”

Grantaire opens his mouth, closes it again, then says, “What?”

“Don't lie to me again.”

Grantaire stares at him. 

“I mean it, Grantaire. Never again.”

“Fine,” Grantaire says. “I won't. But _you_ have to accept the truth.”

“One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.”

Grantaire looks unimpressed.

Enjolras sighs. “Fine. It was a mistake. We were too excited by the possibility of it all working out to consider the results if it didn't. We fucked up.”

“I thought so.” Grantaire starts walking again. 

“Can I ask you a question?”

Grantaire doesn't reply, which Enjolras takes as affirmation.

“Do you have a gun on you right now?”

That surprises a laugh out of Grantaire. He looks at Enjolras, cocks his head to the side. “No,” he says.

“Really?”

“Do you want to check? A quick pat down?” 

“Shut up,” Enjolras says, rolling his eyes, and there it is again, Grantaire's relentless flirting dragging camaraderie right out of him. 

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I wanted to know if you were scared of me. Enough to—” He stops.

“Enough to kill you?” Grantaire says. “If I were scared of you, I wouldn't be the person assigned to spy on you. And if I'd wanted to kill you, I would've done it already.”

“What if I killed you?” Enjolras says. “What if I killed you and did it anyway?”

“Then I guess you'd kill me and then do it anyway.”

“Would you try to stop me?”

“Would I try to stop you from literally murdering me?” Grantaire turns to him again, raises an eyebrow. “What do _you_ think?”

“I'm just trying to—” Enjolras frowns, because exactly what he's trying to do is beyond him. “Figure you out.”

“For the record, I doubt you have the ability to kill someone in cold blood,” Grantaire says. “Even if you did, I'm a lot stronger than you are, so anything short of a gun would probably backfire. And if you did go for the gun, well, I'm sure you've figured out by now that I'm Special Forces-trained, so I'll probably be fine.” He puts a new cigarette in his mouth and lights it. “I don't particularly want to fight you, but if it's a fight for my life, I guarantee you I'll win.”

“What if I told you that I do have a gun, and unless you let me use it to kill you, I'm sending my full confession to the cyber crime division of the FBI?”

Grantaire goes completely still. 

“I don't understand what you're asking me,” he says tonelessly.

“I'm calling your bluff,” Enjolras says. “You won't hurt me.” 

“You think I'd rather die than put you in jail?”

“Yes.”

“I don't even know you. We only met a few months ago.” Grantaire shakes his head. “I'm not the one who's bluffing, Enjolras.” A puff of smoke with every word. Silence as he inhales, exhales, inhales.

Enjolras looks around. They're in a sufficiently shaded part of Riverside Park, and there are crimes here all the time and nobody ever gets caught. He reaches into his waistband and pulls it out, points it at Grantaire. 

“Yeah,” Enjolras says, cocking the gun. “You are.”

“Don't be stupid, Enjolras,” Grantaire says. He's staring at the gun, but when Enjolras replies, Grantaire tears his eyes off it.

“Are you going to stop me?”

“What happens if I do?”

“I go to jail for cyberterrorism,” Enjolras says. “I probably get tried for treason. The evidence is there to convict me if I send it to them.”

“You need testimony from two witnesses to convict you of treason,” Grantaire says. “If I'm not around—it's not like Combeferre and Courfeyrac are going to—”

“Luckily Musichetta has all the information you have,” Enjolras says. “Not to mention Joly and Bossuet. And,” and this one he doesn't know for sure, but he drops it anyway: “Eponine.”

Grantaire stares at him, and Enjolras knows he's right.

“That's four witnesses,” Enjolras says. “One who's been spying on my friends and me for at least three years. One who's been listening in on meetings and probably recording them since you popped up in my life. One who's been following Courfeyrac around. One who's been following Combeferre around. Did you think I wouldn't figure it out?”

Grantaire exhales smoke. 

“Bossuet, Courfeyrac's law school classmate? Joly who used to work at the same company as Combeferre? Both suddenly working at a cafe with incredible internet?”

“They're not related to this,” Grantaire says. “They hated their jobs and wanted to—their dream was always—”

“You said you wouldn't lie to me.”

Grantaire falls silent. 

“What I want to know is, how come Courfeyrac and Combeferre have had shadows for years and I only got one recently?”

“They thought—” Grantaire looks at Enjolras, almost apologetically. “They thought you weren't mentally stable enough to be a threat. And they thought you were all talk. They thought the bartender was enough, that Courfeyrac and Combeferre were the technological heavyweights.”

“But I work in infosec.”

“You covered your tracks well,” Grantaire says. “We didn't realize you were really dangerous until—well, until I met you, really. I knew immediately.”

“Of course you did.”

“Enjolras,” Grantaire says. “Put the gun away.”

“What's the penalty for treason?”

Grantaire stares at him.

“Grantaire.”

“Congress gets to—choose.”

“What will they choose for me?”

Silence.

“Grantaire.”

“Death.”

“So,” Enjolras says. “Are you going to stop me?”

Grantaire doesn't move as Enjolras presses closer, until his gun brushes almost lovingly against Grantaire's lips.

“No,” Grantaire says.

Enjolras pulls the trigger. Grantaire actually flinches, eyes squeezed tight, bracing for an impact that would have hit him almost instantly.

“It's not loaded,” Enjolras says. “Relax. Open your eyes.”

Grantaire does, and Enjolras moves the gun, cups a hand around his neck, and kisses him.

Grantaire doesn't kiss him back, stands guitar-string taut, tense down to the curve of his mouth, his only movement the wild thudding of his pulse beneath Enjolras's fingers.

Enjolras pulls away, examining him. Grantaire's eyes are wide, the last bits of a cigarette burning between his fingertips.

“What the fuck, Enjolras,” he says, voice hoarse. 

“I had to know,” Enjolras says. “I had to be sure.”

“Sure of _what_?”

“That you were bluffing.”

“It wasn't enough to—trust me?” He says it with a cruel almost-scoff, like he knows how ridiculous this suggestion is.

“I _did_ trust you,” Enjolras says. “Why else would I have come here to the woods with you, alone, seemingly unarmed?”

“You already knew I wouldn't have told anyone,” Grantaire says, rubbing the back of his hand against his mouth.

“I wanted to know if you meant it,” Enjolras says. “I needed to—I didn't know if I was right. To trust you. But I did, implicitly, impossibly, and I needed to—I had to make sure.”

“So you asked me to die for you.”

“And you did.” Enjolras smiles helplessly. “Well, sort of.”

“You're so—fucked up,” Grantaire says. “I mean—Jesus Christ, Enjolras, what—” 

“I know,” Enjolras says. “But you would've done it.”

“Would _you_?”

“Obviously,” Enjolras says. “But your life's not exactly in danger.”

“Did you not think,” Grantaire says through gritted teeth, “that this would damage any of your remaining good will with me? That now that you've literally pretended to kill me, any residual—feelings I might have are gone?”

He's right. Enjolras didn't consider that. 

“Are they?”

Grantaire's eyes slip into that blankness of theirs, but he doesn't say anything.

“Grantaire,” Enjolras says, as gently as he can manage. “I need you.”

“For what? Safety? I can't guarantee you that if you keep fucking up like this. I'm off your case, and it's only a matter of time before someone catches you doing some other stupidly illegal thing. I won't be able to help you again.”

“No.”

“Then _what_?”

“I—I've never.” Enjolras closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, Grantaire's arms are crossed. “I don't feel like this. Ever. Except for you.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“You're my whole heart, Grantaire, the whole fucking thing. Come back.”

He isn't sure what he's asking Grantaire to come back to, but Grantaire seems to understand anyway. His eyes are locked on Enjolras's, and in the spring sun they look almost amber.

“That doesn't even make any sense.”

Enjolras waits.

Grantaire finally sighs, closes his eyes.

“You're a disaster of a person,” Grantaire says. “But I love you anyway.” He sounds miserable, lost, and Enjolras feels a painful pang at having been the person who caused him to sound that way. 

“I love you too,” Enjolras says, and smiles at Grantaire again. 

Miraculously, desperately, Grantaire smiles back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title style is copied from the episode titling styles of the show Mr. Robot. 80% of the computer lingo in this fic also comes from Mr. Robot; the rest has been collected over two and a half decades of fucking with computers til they did what I wanted & some codeacademy. Infosec engineer moonlighting as a hacker is basically the no-frills plot of Mr. Robot. First line almost directly quotes Fight Club. “In action how like an angel” etc is from _Hamlet_. So is “quintessence of dust.” Title is from Sappho. Also, after writing this, I found out that basically every Les Mis coffee shop AU uses the name “LiberTea.” We're a fandom of awful puns.
> 
> Anyway, a special thank you to defractum, the lesmisbigbang tireless/incredible/brilliant mod, for setting all this up & making sure we all had our shit together. I haven't participated in a big bang since like 2010 (#bandombigbang #reel_merlin #tbt), and I'm so happy that's still a space that exists & brings tons of writers and artists together to create what almost always end up being really lovely works. Also, a million million million thank yous to my artist, [Date](http://grantaiiiire.tumblr.com), whose work is absolutely stunning—go check out more of her stuff!
> 
> Pretty please leave a comment & let me know what you liked/hated/wished was totally different/wanted to read more of.


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